Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Two Nov-Dec 2026.
Manly Man Essentials, poems by Nathanael O’Reilly.
Manly Man Essentials
I’ve never owned: an angle-grinder, blowtorch
or soldering iron – definitely not an anvil.
A chainsaw for cutting up trees felled by storms.
A generator for powering the central heating
when the electricity goes out. A Ute or pick-up truck
for hauling stuff and feeling tough. A tractor
for ploughing fields and towing a trailer
loaded high with baled hay. A set of golf clubs.
A fishing rod, reel and tackle box. A boat –
not even a dinghy, kayak or canoe. A snowboard,
despite snowboarding many times. A speargun,
flippers and mask. A saddle, cowboy hat, boots
or belt buckle, despite living in Texas for decades.
A muscle car. A gold chain. An electric guitar.
Boxing gloves and a punching bag. A motorbike –
not even an 80cc Yamaha dirtbike in my teens.
A hockey stick and skates (clearly, I’ve never lived
in Canada). A gun – not even a .22 bolt-action
rifle for shooting rabbits, a double-barrel shotgun
for shooting ducks, or a .303 semi-automatic rifle
for killing sprinting foxes and bounding kangaroos.
From San Francisco to Sidney
We reunited late last century in San Francisco, blasted
U2’s Bullet the Blue Sky from the stereo leaving the airport
(outside it’s America! Americaaaaaaa!), browsed City Lights, quoted
Ginsberg (starving hysterical naked), crossed the Golden Gate and Bay
Bridges, strolled the marina at Sausalito, climbed Coit Tower, swam
at Half Moon Bay, bought Chinatown fireworks, navigated one-way streets
and Steve McQueen hills, turned right at red lights. We drove Interstate 80
from San Francisco to Sidney, Nebraska, traveled one thousand, two
hundred and seventy-one miles in a two-door red Nissan Sentra,
dreamcatcher dangling from the rearview mirror, sang along with Counting
Crows, Live, Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Alanis, visited a drug store
in Berkeley, danced to Van Morrison in the rain in a pine forest
near Lake Tahoe, ran barefoot through June snow, gambled and lost in Reno,
slept in the car between the railway line and the freeway near Elko,
Nevada, were woken by the wind from a passing freight train, wrestled
and performed headstands on the lawn outside the Mormon Tabernacle
in Salt Lake City, mooned the west from a Utah red rock formation,
picnicked on the prairie in Wyoming, drove over mountain ranges,
across vast deserts and salt plains, ate maple-syrup-soaked pancake stacks
in working-class diners, overtook Dodges, Buicks and Chevrolets,
sipped duty free Glenfiddich while lying on the hood in the desert
after midnight beneath glorious constellations as Astral Weeks
emanated from the stereo, passed hundreds of cheesy billboards,
refueled at Little America gas stations, cruised down the Inter-
state beneath wide-open blue skies in bare feet wearing t-shirts, tank tops
and shorts, gorgeous Arikara legs extending to the dashboard, rubbed
sunscreen into arms hanging out of windows, let the wind tear through hair,
crossed the continental divide in Wyoming seven thousand feet
above sea level. On my seventh night in America we ate
at Dude’s Steakhouse and Brandin’ Iron Bar in Sidney, Nebraska, then shared
a room in the Deluxe Motel, drank cheap champagne in bed, stayed up late
watching TV entwined, fantasized about a future together.
The Craic in Brendan Lynch’s
The sun is splitting the stones. Today was a super day.
It’s the best January day ever. Ach, the climate is changing,
for sure it is. Aye, the lough was frozen solid in 1963.
We played fucking football on it and walked out
to the island. There were one hundred and forty old people
that used to go to The Larches. There’s only three of them alive
now. The Duffys there was seven. There was eight at the O’Briens.
All big families then. Nine or ten in every house. He’d be the same
age as myself, seventy-one like. Give a man a bad name
and it sticks forever. Ah well, first I said you’d be worried
about travelling, but then I said you know it will work out,
things will settle down like. Oh, sure you could manage going
to a place like that you know. Yeah, but it’s funny, no checks
coming back into England or anything? It would be hard
to make sure they’d had the vaccines like. It is a wonder
alright. Even getting out of Ireland would have been too
hard. Jaysus, she’s a fine-looking woman for sixty-two!
NB: All of the phrases used in the poem were overheard
in Brendan Lynch’s pub in Clonbur, Galway.
© Nathanael O’Reilly
Irish-Australian poet Nathanael O’Reilly’s fifteen collections include Scatter & Settle, Separation Blues, Dublin Wandering, Landmarks, Selected Poems of Ned Kelly, Boulevard, (Un)belonging and Preparations for Departure. His poetry appears in journals and anthologies published in fifteen countries, including The Belfast Review, Coastlines, Cordite, The Honest Ulsterman, Howl: New Irish Writing, Meanjin, New World Writing Quarterly, Oxford Magazine, Southerly, Southword: New International Writing, West Trade Review, Westerly and Wisconsin Review. He has been a finalist and winner in Australian, Irish and American poetry competitions; he is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at The University of Texas at Arlington.