by Kevin Higgins

It interferes with the right of people like me
to dine as we see fit.

Whenever I visit England
1649, the sound of it taking just one swing
of an inarticulate axe
to abolish monarchy
puts me off my coffee.
After that, with every mug
I see King Charles’
dripping head being tossed
like a football to a crowd who, I’m sorry,
are all in desperate need of a dentist.

When I land in France at its moment of terror
though I’m up for Liberté, égalité, fraternité
in theory
the fact the revolutionaries don’t stop
to wipe the blade between chops
makes my l’escargot difficult to digest.

And I’ve never found a version
of the Haitian slave revolt
during which several exquisite
tankards of rum – of the kind
I aspire to drink –
weren’t unnecessarily spilt.

During the burning of Atlanta, wherever I situate
my alfresco table, it’s always overthrown
and my black-eyed peas roll
tragically into the oven-like street.
This, Mr Lincoln, I will not forgive.

Similarly, the day of Mr King’s march
on Washington, I found the ice cream parlours
impossibly overcrowded.
To such an extent, on the national holiday
that bears his name
I scream for the knickerbocker glories
to which I, as a citizen, am entitled.

And now History’s come to visit us here in Portland,
it appalls to find Black Lives Matter –
which I thought I supported – breathing
a little too definitely in our direction,
when my husband just wants
to stroke his humanist beard in peace
while I consider:
which soup?

Kevin Higgins is co-organiser of Over The Edge literary events in Galway. He has published five full collections of poems: The Boy With No Face (2005), Time Gentlemen, Please (2008), Frightening New Furniture (2010), The Ghost In The Lobby (2014), & Sex and Death at Merlin Park Hospital (2019). His poems also feature in Identity Parade – New British and Irish Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010) and in The Hundred Years’ War: modern war poems (Ed Neil Astley, Bloodaxe May 2014). Kevin was satirist-in-residence with the alternative literature website The Bogman’s Cannon 2015-16. 2016 – The Selected Satires of Kevin Higgins was published by NuaScéalta in 2016. The Minister For Poetry Has Decreed was published by Culture Matters (UK) also in 2016. Song of Songs 2:0 – New & Selected Poems was published by Salmon in Spring 2017. Kevin is a highly experienced workshop facilitator and several of his students have gone on to achieve publication success. He has facilitated poetry workshops at Galway Arts Centre and taught Creative Writing at Galway Technical Institute for the past fifteen years. Kevin is the Creative Writing Director for the NUI Galway International Summer School and also teaches on the NUIG BA Creative Writing Connect programme. His poems have been praised by, among others, Tony Blair’s biographer John Rentoul, Observer columnist Nick Cohen, writer and activist Eamonn McCann, historian Ruth Dudley Edwards, and Sunday Independent columnist Gene Kerrigan; and have been quoted in The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, The Times (London), Hot Press magazine, The Daily Mirror and on The Vincent Browne Show, and read aloud by Ken Loach at a political meeting in London. The Stinging Fly magazine has described Kevin as “likely the most widely read living poet in Ireland”. One Kevin’s poems will feature in A Galway Epiphany, the final instalment of Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor series of novels which is published later this year. His work has been broadcast on RTE Radio, Lyric FM, and BBC Radio 4. His sixth poetry collection, Ecstatic, will be published by Salmon next summer.