A habit:
I’ve always lifted my shirt up alone in bathrooms as if I can catch my stomach in the act of what it’s trying to do (pink lines from where its constituent parts roll into themselves, woodlouse-like)
Lengths
Rising above the water surface a person’s arm elides itself: I’ve left my glasses in a dented green box (I had to) to preclude things involving shards on tiles, downward floatings, all the possible angles of slippage. (I think about the space behind my ears.)
Evening Primrose
The swung weight of pain in side-muscle lets the light through me, does its judging work while I do mine, assessing density. The deer bouquet-legged suspends itself in flight above flood debris: I have been the paused, felt a performed rest’s cold coin on my eyelid. I hear that it is not a nice procedure. I hear that they keep watch on you in increments afterwards, sending their crisp letters for years.
Alicia Byrne Keane is a final year PhD student from Ireland, working on an Irish Research Council-funded PhD study that problematizes ‘vagueness’ and the ethics of translation in the writing of Samuel Beckett and Haruki Murakami, at Trinity College Dublin. Alicia’s poetry has been published in The Moth, The Colorado Review, The Cardiff Review, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Banshee, Abridged, and the Honest Ulsterman, among other journals. Alicia’s poem ‘surface audience’ has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
