Alicia Byrne Keane is a poet from Dublin, with work published in The Moth, Banshee, The Stinging Fly, Boulevard, Stand, Acumen, The Colorado Review and Dedalus Press’s anthology ‘Romance Options: Love Poems for Today’, among other publications. Alicia’s writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the Best New Poets Anthology and the Best of the Net Anthology, and has been funded by Dublin City Council, Fingal County Council and The Arts Council of Ireland. In May 2023, Alicia was selected for Ireland’s National Mentoring Programme. Alicia’s debut collection Pretend Cartoon Strength is available to pre-order from Broken Sleep Books.

Treehouse

The branches were the weeping kind, light greened once inside
its cool network, earth a shadow beneath us.
There was an entrance; it could be ducked into.
One horizontal bough was worn glossy
by years of feet and hands.
Lee says we had a cat,
she died when she was eight. We could have tried
to find out what happened to her, but they would have had
to cut her open. He is calm. Two summers skip
and Lise is thirteen, sensible in the crow’s nest, joining us
only now and then. Our pulley system, rigged with blue rope,
is breaking. Lopped branches fork,
form a staircase. We flit in the dark.

I keep reminding myself how it wasn’t simpler,
how rocks jutted in the fields like teeth.
The house in the village with the hedge curved into train-set shapes
was inhabited one year, empty the next.
It would be years before I’d Google the definition
of a mood-swing, feel gulfs of foot-slipped air between myself
and the friends I sat beside in pubs. It would be years
before we had to memorize Dickinson, like the bee,
delirious borne, but I’d remember most
the part about swinging on the hours.

Record

The outside. Black dust in the skylight.
Remember eyeshadow. Or else
I am trying to talk to myself at six years old,
a child afraid of thunderstorms.
The moth in the corner of the room
meets its outline over and over.
I was trying to buy a new pair of glasses
today like the ones I had
the year I moved away and back a few times,
was in love often and wasn’t.
Classic, roundish and tortoiseshell,
the kind everyone has.
We’re in the swooping part of the heatwave,
the whim made a pavement-warm sense
at the time. Recently I found pages
of my late grandfather’s handwriting,
packed close in blue ink pen.
The words stretched cloudward, the feeling
was of someone there in the next room
clacking books open and shut.

Woven

At the end of the garden
are the boughs we have pruned,
offcuts of several summers.
Think of it now: if you were to lift
each layer, there would be branches
of a thing like pine,
crisped ochre by sun, time, sun.
There would be sticks
lopped where they fork,
bright with blonde discs
where the twigs once grew.
There would be a buzz and a ticking
of beetles, a colony of woodlice
visible only at the moment of slippage,
their undersides a busy pallor;
there would be a single false widow
wending under and over the twigs
at the core of things,
its quiet body like a wood-knot,
seeming so far
from the light of the afternoon.

Coasting

Dark bulbs of trees along the sandspit:
earlier I hung my t-shirt on an antler
of barnacled rock, realised too late
an anemone glistened there, hidden
in shade. I swam and told myself
that it wasn’t as hot outside
as other days, or that it was just as hot outside
as other days. I wish, now, you were beside me
sharing this suspended feeling, pedals ticking
when both feet rest balanced, light flat
on the greenway like it has nothing
to catch but the bowed grasses.
Parts of the ground are scooped out here
and on bad days the sea rushes in.