Today was a bad day for poems,

but otherwise

there are so many buildings I can show you

that look half-woken and horrible,

hydrangeas in front gardens

lit with the rawness of soil. I am thinking of

a siren I can’t localize,

at its loudest swell it finds me

hurried in a smear of glass,

the air like threads waning.

On the quays I get the idea

you’re walking beside me, we’re 19 or 20

going to Workmans.

An evening can lengthen into something like

a shopfront or a tousled rose & I’m afraid

of the Centra,

I count all the surfaces that

could harm me. When I was a kid

I went through a phase where I was scared

of almost all objects,

I had got a papercut from a

book & it’s like I only realised then that hurt

can conceal itself in matte corners, before

picking anything up

I’d always be asking

is this sharp

Alicia Byrne Keane thinks a lot about coastal wildflowers, the short film medium, and sleep paralysis-induced ghost sightings. Alicia has a first class honours degree in English Literature and French from Trinity College Dublin and a MSt. in English Literature 1900-Present from Oxford University, and is finishing work on an Irish Research Council-funded PhD study problematizing ‘vagueness’ and the ethics of translation in the work of Samuel Beckett and Haruki Murakami, at TCD. Alicia’s poetry has been published in The Moth, The Colorado Review, The Cardiff Review, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Banshee, Parentheses Journal, Abridged, and The Honest Ulsterman, among others. Alicia’s poem ‘surface audience’ was nominated for a Pushcart Prize; the short story ‘Snorkels’ was featured in Marrowbone Books' anthology The Globe and Scales, alongside the work of other Irish writers such as Dermot Bolger, Mia Gallagher, and Louise Nealon; the poem ‘Cloud / land arc’ was nominated for the Orison Anthology.