Alicia Byrne Keane: 2 Poems

Bifurcate / Poetics of a health scare

(You told me the trick
was to become only lungs    
mimic sleep                      

swallow stars and marigolds, or
the tiny blooms I saw once,                 

Arctic-looking in cracks of red earth,
the dark that                                        

dances across a squashed eyeball when you
​raise your head                                               

​from the pillow in the morning)         

Post-post / Weird damp sky

                                            Draughty inside, the trailing houseplant

'Whenever I try the document sits on my laptop making me feel subdued'
The rehearsal space a Georgian building that looked half underground like
It was emerging from somewhere

                                            ​The bicycle mounted on the wall, the
Day we transported instruments in shopping trolleys over cobblestones
Cold traveled up my arms

​A streetlight haloed a tangle of wires, leads and cases in a pile, the wheels
                                            ​​Going the wrong way making me laugh. 

Alicia Byrne Keane is a PhD student from Dublin, Ireland. She 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. She is currently working on an Irish Research Council-funded PhD study of 'vagueness' and translation in the work of Samuel Beckett and Haruki Murakami. She has assisted on the editing team for the New Welsh Review. Her poetry, short fiction, and photography have been published previously in The Moth, Entropy Magazine, the [PANK] blog, Poethead, and The Bohemyth.