S.C. Flynn

Araucania, Chile, 1800 AD This is no job for the young, Melipal; only old women like me will go on using one dream to explain another in this language twisted like dry tree roots. Your five lights have watched us fight the Incas and live and trade with the Spanish and you know I’ve fought… Continue reading Tenth View of the Southern Cross

A clot of bare rocks in Ireland’s bloodstream, the Burren shows a sullen, death-like stare under a sky that offers no relief. From this photo, no one would ever know what once stood there, what secrets hidden before the glaciers stripped it all away. If I ask an AI to imagine details outside the frame,… Continue reading Addition

So now I’ve seen the Northern Lights without shifting from my room. A GPS tracker of my movements would be just a steady blob, a mosquito trapped in amber. Yes, sediment tends to settle, but this feels like identity theft, as if I were a crisis actor dressed in a borrowed costume for a party… Continue reading Predictive Text

Somewhere near Mullingar on the third or fourth day, a thin boy of five or so stood by the road dropping stones in a famine pot one by one with a satisfying ping, each metallic plink raising the level a fraction like an inverted burial cairn piled by a dead chieftain’s followers. I was walking… Continue reading Somewhere Near Mullingar

THE INVENTOR OF BUTTERFLIES Hanging by mortality’s fraying rope in this reluctant hurry to grow old is the last and saddest surprise of all. Regret is a freed slave turned dictator who passed me on his road to power and waits at every corner, reciting a history of things that never happened. Birds flying backwards… Continue reading The Inventor of Butterflies and Uncle jack

Newgrange, County Meath Just watch these starlings in the twilight, thousands of them forming countless patterns, ink swirling in this glass of evening. Each bird’s tiny impulses contribute in magnifying freedom and beauty to the very edge of limitless space; the world’s mind twisting and turning right before our uncomprehending eyes, hidden in mysterious symbols… Continue reading Emergence

A group of poems just published in A Thin Slice of Anxiety: THE BATTLE FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY They lied when they said that nothingwould ever be the same again,when the icy truth cuts much deeper;nothing will ever be different.Turn your back on the challenge if you want to,but at last when we’ve opened every… Continue reading Six Poems

My poetry collection THE COLOUR OF EXTINCTION will be published by Renard Press on 9 October 2024. You can PRE-ORDER now – this really helps the publisher to see how much interest there is. Please spread the word to anyone who might be interested. From the Renard Press page: Under a sky the colour of extinctionyou choose your… Continue reading The Colour of Extinction

FEVER’S CHILD The world reduced to a vague presence in a dream, a quiet, senseless and irresponsible, while the fear is a constant hard wind in the face, the kind that bends trees, weathers stones and strips branches. A body temperature of forty Celsius is a distorting mirror that stretches time out long and thin,… Continue reading Fever’s Child and Thirty Years

A sound no one else in the world can hearthat may not even exist at all,a transmission to an exoplanet.Perfect lines of poetry recitedin a language you knew before you were bornbut will never again remember.The most wonderful story of allthat you cannot begin to understandtold just to you by a million voices.Endless chatbot hallucinations,a… Continue reading Tinnitus