2021 Winner - Maeve Joy Taggart

We are delighted to announce our 2021 winner. Maeve Joy Taggart. We are cautiously hopeful that we may have a tribute night this coming August and look forward to hearing her performance, as well as those of Ianna and Dara.

Past creative writing projects have been largely poetry based, with poems collected on the Instagram account @maevejmct and practice in fiction developed during the first period of lockdown in 2020. Creative non-fiction writing has lead to the piece 'Sugar-Pilled Love' being shortlisted for the Wow! Women in Writing 2019 Creative Non-Fiction competition and the piece 'A 'Brief' Update on Cork's Attitude to Sexual Assault' being  ​

shortlisted for the 'I'll Show You Mine' journals 2019 prize in non-fiction. Creative writing work has been published in two volumes of The Quarryman, Motley Magazine and The Cherry Revolution. Non-fiction and news have been published in The University Express, Shared Future News, Motley and SpunOut.ie. 

​Below we publish Maeve's very poignant piece; "To Lockdown and April Showers".​

To Lockdown and April Showers
It feels less poignant now. Drum-hammer heavy on the window-sill,
sitting through soliloquy to a promised summer - this is not catharsis.
No love letter to days broken beneath storm clouds and hurricanes,
disemboweled umbrellas discarded from white-knuckled grasp -
you said there would be flowers.

Grow them in the pavement cracks, wound between two streets
graft ivy through the ribs and lungs submerged, breathe into them
these rivers rising in this eternal tide - what time is it?

Almost a year to the day that hours became a metric to measure death,
mass graves for the future dug deeper, stock markets submerged
like days are - beneath water rippled by you, robbed by you but
April, I am being cruel.

Thought-executing fires put out by rain-drops deliberate, doomed
cities pulled back from dread and cocooned - storm-safe seclusion
swallowed and submerged, the seeds sown. It hurts but you’re here,
our lost April of occupied beds and sheets over head -
​the flowers are coming, aren’t they?