Festive Frazz!
Celebrate Christmas with new poetry and flash fiction
Festive greetings from the Frazz team! Tomorrow is Christmas Day, and we’re celebrating here at Frazz HQ with brand new poetry and seasonal flash.
Happy Christmas to you all!
Chrismas Angel Chimes: a triolet
by Emily Cullen
Trilling in the middle of the table, four candles set brass angels spinning on invisible wisps. Top cherub, blowing his bugle, nearly topples, tilts, trilling in the middle of the table. Four candles flicker as the year turns its axle to precarious sentinels that herald our innocence ephemeral. Trilling in the middle of the table, four candles set brass angels spinning on invisible wisps.
It’s a shame what we’ve done to Chrismas
by Jennifer McMahon
Christmas Eve and the traffic is mental, even the pedestrians are jamming up, and that wee bollocks of a Santa outside the Centra store is going to get one hell of a beating if he doesn’t stop clattering his bell. I’ve no choice but to be out here, because Penny will die if she doesn’t get the new AI-powered gender conforming non-non-binary speaking squeaking walking squawking fully functional fashionable Fantastic Fionnuala doll for Christmas.
My phone buzzes, a voice clip from Tommy. ‘Any luck?’
I call him back. ‘Are you joking?’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘It’s a warzone out here. I’ve tried the shopping centre, three toy stores, now I’m on Main Street, trying to get to the carpark so I can...’ A tear springs free, unwanted, unasked for. Fantastic Fionnuala doesn’t cry. Not one of her pre-installed features. ‘Does she really have to have it?’
‘Really, and all I can say is fair dues to you for trying.’
‘What are you up to?’
‘Oh, I’m on my second G&T. Well, best of luck.’
Santa is seriously lucky not to have an iPhone bounced off his noggin.
The lights turn green, and the traffic doesn’t budge. A delivery lorry, double-parked outside one of the ten pubs on this street, has blocked our progress. The driver behind me blows his horn, then the one in front. I’m tempted… but no. Funny, though; if I close my eyes, it kind of sounds like sleigh bells in the snow.
My thoughts drift… to Christmas Eve morning, some thirty years ago plus change. Harder times, harder days. Mam was up early to light the fire, Dad was coming in after doing the milking, and I was bawling because Mam had just told me that Santa was going through an unspecified personal crisis, and the new doll I was getting wasn’t going to be the one I wanted. Dad walked into the middle of things, looked at his wife and daughter, and burst out laughing.
‘There’s the spirit of Christmas, such as it is these days,’ he said, then he picked me up in his arms and kissed me on my forehead. ‘Listen to me, a leanabh; your mother would pluck the stars from the sky and braid them into your hair if she thought it’d make you happy, and I’d lasso the moon for you and stick it in the hayshed, just so you could say you’d walked on it. We’d do anything for you, but this year is a tight one. We’ll make do, but we need your help. Will you come along with us, so we can sail the rough waters together? Will you, my girl?’
Someone knocks on the car window, jolting me back to Main Street. The local sergeant, his head cocked, unseasonable suspicion souring his face. I put the window down.
‘Are you after a drink or two, madam?’ he says.
‘What? No, of course not.’
‘You’ve been sitting here for a full minute, blocking the street.’
‘Ah,’ I say. ‘I’m under the influence.’
‘Drugs, is it?’
‘No, Christmas.’
He gives a knowing nod, taps the roof of the car. ‘Say no more. We’ll soon be out the other side of it, and back to better days. It’s a shame what we’ve done to it, though, isn’t it? To Christmas, I mean.’
‘It is, sergeant. A crying shame. Will you let me off with a warning?’
‘Would you heed it?’
‘Ah, you’re right, I probably wouldn’t.’
‘That’s the Christmas spirit, right enough. Go on ahead, madam, and mind how you go.’
He waves me on, and on I go, to the end of Main Street then around by the quieter part of town and back along the dark roads to home. Tommy opens the door to me, looks at my empty hands. I shake my head.
‘Storms ahead,’ he says.
Inside, he makes a cup of tea for me. I take it into the sitting room, where Penny is watching cartoons. That pig she loves. Go figure. The girl she is now, the raw child she is, so fresh and free to life, can do better than be influenced by an AI-powered gender conforming non-non-binary speaking squeaking walking squawking fully functional fashionable Fantastic Fionnuala doll. Some toy company executive’s vision of what the perfect female should look like, dress like, talk like, be like. How she should feel, even, but I don’t want my daughter’s worldview to be so constricted, and so unforgiving of herself and others. Not on my watch.
I turn off the television, silence her complaints. ‘I want to tell you a story,’ I say. ‘An important one.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘A Christmas Eve, a long time ago, when I was your age. It was the night my father went to God, and I learned what’s really important about this season, and about life. Will you listen to me, a leanabh?’
As the words leave my mouth, I feel my father’s ones pouring into me again, and filling me up. It was one of the last times he ever spoke to his daughter, a little girl who wanted nothing more than the best doll there was for her gift. The next morning, she learned about loss, about grief, and the precious gift her father had given her on their last day together.
Such a shame what we’ve done to Christmas, what we make ourselves and our children believe it’s really about, but it doesn’t have to be that way. For today, I’ll do what I can to remedy it, and then I’m going to braid my girl’s hair with stars.
Two poems by Laura Cooney
Born Again
In the weak milk sunset a snowman stands sentry, watching a distant procession of fireflies wind gloam-lit to the kirk. There’s to be a choir tonight. And on the jewel edged pond, a transluscent swan toe-tips to the ice pirouetting on one pointed toe to reach a spinning top point and dissolve into the glassy vapour, she expels. The black bough sheds its silver. Dusting dandruff in the breeze, skaters gone, the snowman waits, watches. Till the pond is an inkwell, lapping yesterday's feathers. Shrill children fill the air and high up in the mint-sky, the snowman thinks to be born again.
Patience: War Will Be Won
Winter sends its army. Shards of vapour spilling from the mint air, the ponds changing from night-ink to pristine glass-plate and the sun, a low milk bath sighs, squeezes her eyes shut, fills her lungs with the peal of a bell. The current Tuesday’s Bailies Cream, froths and , The Sun’s thoughts crane only to hedgerows. From bare, frost-frozen soil, a single soldiering bud emerges. Primula: The Cowslip, in defence of bracken, holding this dry patch of weetabix ground, against the gloam-damp of, Winter’s supposed best general. Spring arrives early, on tiptoes; observing this all, with patience, against the drystone wall.
Jennifer McMahon is an Irish writer, and is represented by Brian Langan at Storyline Literary Agency. She was the overall winner of the 2024 All-Ireland Scholarships Creative Writing Award (public category), a winner of the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair, has been shortlisted for Short Story of the Year at the Irish Book Awards (2023), the Bridport Short Story Prize and many other notable awards, and is currently a finalist in the Leopold Bloom Prize for Innovative Narration 2026. She was a second-place winner of the Oxford Prize (winter 2023), and was twice longlisted for the Bath Short Story Award. Jennifer's work appears in Crannog (2023 and 2025), HOWL, New Irish Writing in the Irish Independent, The Galway Review, the Oxford Prize Anthology (2022 and 2023), Fractured Lit, Heimat Review (issues 2 and 6), Empyrean, Variant Lit, Frazzled Lit, Books Ireland Magazine, Loft Books (issues IV and V), the Retreat West 'Swan Song' Anthology, the Cowboy Jamboree 'Motel' anthology, Orphic Review, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Mythic Picnic, The Irish Writers Handbook (2024, 2025 and 2026) and other places. Jennifer has been nominated for both a Pushcart and Best Of The Net.
You can find out more about Jennifer, and read some of other work, at https://linktr.ee/authorjmcm
Laura Cooney is from Edinburgh with an M.A in English Language and Literature from Glasgow University. Her first poetry chapbook Motherbunnet, published by Backroom Poetry in 2023, sold out of its limited print run and her next, entitled, No Trauma/No Drama (also with Backroom Poetry) is due for release in August 2024.
Laura’s work has been published most recently in Northern Gravy (issue 11) Loft (issue V) Punk Noir (‘Betrayal’ issue) The Voidspace Zine (various pop-ups) Roi Faineant Press (Cubiclemate 68) The Winged Moon (‘Ancient’ issue) and in many more places.
Find Laura on Twitter and Instagram: @lozzawriting and www.lozzawriting.com
Emily Cullen is a Galway-based writer and the Meskell Poet in Residence at the University of Limerick, where she lectures on the MA in Creative Writing. She has published three poetry collections to date: Conditional Perfect (Doire Press, 2019), In Between Angels and Animals (Arlen House, 2013) and No Vague Utopia (Ainnir Publishing, 2003). Conditional Perfect was included in The Irish Times round-up of “the best new poetry of 2019”. Emily holds a PhD in English from the University of Galway. Twice nominated for the Pushcart prize, her poetry explores themes of history, social justice, ecology, music and the female experience.
A lovely start to the day that will involve peeling lots of spuds, carrots and God knows what else. I'll think about braiding stars into my hair instead.