Prayers for Discipline: A Blasphemous Dialectic (substack: Shark’s Parlor, July 2026)
Cathedral Rocks (The Honest Ulsterman, June 2026)
Red River and other poems (guest poet: Blue Lotus Books, July 2026)
Restart (Streetcake Magazine, December 2025)
Emily (Channel Magazine, Spring 2026)
Distillation of the Holy Spirit (Theopneustos, July 2026)
A Temperate Palm (substack: Shark’s Parlor, August 2025)
I began to strip and then
thought better of it.
Fooled like an early daffodil by the hypocrite, March, I stand
half-stripped, afraid of snapping
your cord and losing your signet ring.
It is a cheap ring, black and gold, bought down Castle Black
(your dad’s pub). You wore it with that
kind irony you wore
so beautifully, a fine garment draped on narrow shoulders.
All bones, you warned, when I put my head there.
Crowsong rises, an ugly reel, wounding
in its dissonance. I look through the window of my bone-
white woollen collar
for help. Receding
into the castle grounds: a line of temperate palms, not native.
The crowsong stops.
The smell of mown grass, a slaughter
of blades meeting unexpected ends, arouses
my vision. Among the palms, palm
upturned, you stand, strong and well, wearing your signet ring.
You are flushed
like the time I asked what are all these palm trees doing in Dublin?
and between two halves of a lecture
on the necessity of wildness
you said it’s a temperate fuckin palm, but not native.
Marianne Daigh 