Dr. Alicia Byrne Keane’s poetry has been published in The Moth, Banshee, Oxford Poetry, The Colorado Review, The Stinging Fly, The Galway Review, Crannóg, Poetry Ireland Review and other journals. Writing for the Irish Times, Jessica Traynor described Alicia’s debut collection Pretend Cartoon Strength (Broken Sleep Books, 2023) as a series of ‘meditations within tightly honed forms’, ‘painterly in their detail.’ Alicia is in receipt of an Irish Arts Council Literature Bursary 2024 and has recently completed an Irish Writers Centre Evolution Programme teaching residency at the University of Galway. Alicia’s second poetry collection is forthcoming in 2026.
Shuttlebus
Brake and engine are a catch in a throat
and it’s just one moment
of rolling pressure
but it works like forgetting: we dip
towards the soak of headlands,
the stitched fence, iridescent
fields between the furze,
the heft of us set as if to fly oceanward
searing metal over the concrete blocks
that bound this carpark
but the front-heavy vehicle resettles itself,
sun slants over shoulders
in summer-wedding dresses
and someone resumes talking, says
it eats something, it’s the plant it eats,
and over dinner at round tables
the academic-in-training
who wears contextless black clothes
is recast as a poet who lives in the woods,
the frontman recast as an orchestrator
of ghosts in genteel buildings,
the artist who keeps wildflowers
in both pockets recast as a comet
with shardlike hair. We go home
and I want to be everyone.
There’s a humming noise on the landing
that wasn’t there before
like a future that almost happened
is trying to sheen through,
beneath everything, rocks
foreshortened in cerulean water,
and I hold both my ears shut then ask
if you can hear it, then it stops.
Waiting outside the building for the landlord
I think of all the different lifts
we’ve stood in, eyeing sheened metal with polite
upward or downward expressions while a lanyard
remembers movement.
I think of a place I left
a few years ago, how I thought
our interests wax-bloomed as cactus leaves,
silly in retrospect. We clicked doors closed, stepped
in socks through the porridge silence of the hall.
When the time came to deep-clean
a year of small talk we did it in shifts,
barely coinciding, but I walked through all the rooms
once it was done, looked down at the honeysuckle hedge
starlike between gardens.
I think of neighbourhoods,
the soap-bubble pop of habitation,
streets I’ve known by smiling at all the dogs
but less often at the people. What would it feel like,
an uncrossing of arms? I’ve perfected
a summary of myself,
for the applications.
I can’t remember this sun-saturation of a room.
The first viewing was brief
& gave only a sense of evenness, the blinds
with a line-drawing of seaweed, the tops of the buildings
underwater filigree.
We all smiled at each other
like we were the person who shows up
in the second half of the film.
He’s here.
He’s here now, a car idling,
his speech unrolling with the glass.
He gestures with one arm
for us to follow and we do, on foot, parade-like,
as an underground carpark opens beneath us.
In we go, to the square of dark, eyes adjusting.
Keepsake
Her hair is a loose wave hacked, damp earlier in the day. The question of course who has she lost or who is the person she is on the verge of losing and the smaller loss foreshadows. She tells me about the tide schedule & how you are good for three hours before or three hours after. It is a whole world and I have shown up off-topic, carrying a towel in my basket and a silly fluorescent swimsuit under my jumper. There are just miles of tepid plashing. The husband waits with the dog. It is not her wedding ring or her engagement ring, just some brightness to which there is a feeling attached. She saw a glow some footsteps back but it was the hard edge of a limpet half greyed by sand. It’s past 10pm, the start of an August puckered by wavelets. I have quite a history of this, picking the worst times to move on. I cycle to the Mary statue and watch the peninsula across the powder-blue bay. There is almost no light anymore. For a while there it was every time a pal was having a bad one, resolute little self-preserver. I went to school on the neck of the landmass. When I float back, bike lights on this time, she’s still there: submerged to the calves, looking into the shallows with a torch. Further inland, small, grounded boats on the shimmer of the algae look upturned and papery. I can tell I’m going inward.
Clamp
Soon, I will start noticing again
all sorts of details that don’t have to be true:
a half-deflated orange football on the roof below us,
a wooden trellis a few gardens on
cutting the grey swirl of the North Strand into squares,
how the calls of some seagulls
could be transcribed as bap bap bap
and others as pwee! pwee!,
but the impression is still ink-soaked:
you lying beside me yesterday
as my tears of unknown origin
fell along the path used
by crows’ feet, the arms of glasses.
Later you’ll dream a dog, not the name-checked shadow beast
but rather a huge Jack Russell that comes to hip-height,
and I can see the rest: it wrenched my arm
as I went to pat it in our doorway
and you ran after down the apartment block’s gardens,
unsure where to disrupt the melding.
We laugh it away, picture together,
to scale, how large the dream-dog’s head would be,
like that of a Shetland pony, and I think of tortoises
that grow to be a hundred years old.
Basking
The shark is not real; the house is on the seafront;
the dreams contain a street I’ve never been on
but the week is woken estuarine
& here I am where both water and cloud
look so heavy, so very holographic.
I haven’t gone this way on a bike
since I was much younger,
sandspits, marshland,
the houses here redbrick & wind-lashed
& the scale model of a basking shark
is propped there in the front garden of one,
painted entirely black,
and looks as trees charred
by lightning can look.
I still have this dream sometimes,
I’m standing on a street looks like it’s at the alternate
end of a park, there’s a blue-green overhang of trees
on one side & the light looks strong
like 7pm in summer & I meet you
there & we are both looking up
to some structure like a stack of haybales
or some kind of gate-lodge,
blocky and gold in the foreground
& I can never quite see what it is,
whole thing kind of pointillist
but there are so many parts to a vanishing
& here’s the shark anyway
on this coast that shifts and sheds,
an unreal thing with its jaws at full billow
& taking in the metaphor of the air
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