By Eilín de Paor

Featured Art: Fragmented Locale by Brooke Ripley

The last remaining sycamore on our suburban road
was a playtime shelter; its roots, fairy council seats,
its hollows, a dormouse school.
For developers with an interest in the spare acre,
it was an inconvenience.

The men with chainsaws came, met
a ring of steel-eyed children, spanning the centuries-thick trunk.
I wore my favourite coat for the occasion, a hand-me-down ski jacket—
across my chest, a burnished sunrise patched above a flat-earth horizon.
Hope was a four-foot thing in nylon.

We shook placards, posed for photos, made the front page
of the local paper, before being called in for our supper.
They came again in school hours, left nothing but a stump,
hillocks of saw dust, dormice scrabbling for their copy books
through the still-warm crumble.

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Eilín de Paor lives in Dublin, Ireland. Her poems have appeared in The Stony Thursday Book, Banshee, The Waxed Lemon, The Frogmore Papers, 14, Raleigh Review and Belfield Literary Review, among others. Her chapbook, “In the Jitterfritz of Neon”, a collaboration with Damien B. Donnelly, was published by The Hedgehog Poetry Press.