Cloud / land arc – Alicia Byrne Keane

A memory surfaces lit by a marquee wall;

your messages like bites of fruit oxidising.

 

The beginnings of hills, suddenly and hugely

I feel the time difference like a fall through

 

a black expanse, a hollowed earth. The buzz

of my phone on an unfamiliar bedside table.

 

There’s a place submerged in soaky cloud

that looks strung with lights, in the double

 

layer of glass I align the glimmers with each

pupil, call to a higher altitude. Across the bay

 

a skyscraper glints with the peach-lit image

of its counterpart. On the ferry they gave us

 

cubed pineapple jelly and small tubs of water

with peelable lids. I felt ill-contained, a body

 

of water three floors up. A pale shape moves

down a street-fragment, a square with flags

 

hanging motionless. A person on a bicycle.

The pixel-shifts of the water on the surfaces

 

of everything make my head feel soft. I am,

after all, very high up, and can see myself in

 

too many mirrors at once. The air conditioning

muffles my typing noises which I worry might

 

otherwise be annoying, be heard through the

partition. Dawn a tight feeling, the city makes

 

a noise like a popped ear, a hiss of looped

motorways. All the taxis here have silver roofs.

Alicia Byrne Keane is a PhD student from Ireland, working on an Irish Research Council-funded PhD study problematizing ‘vagueness’ and translation in the work of Samuel Beckett and Haruki Murakami, at Trinity College Dublin. Alicia’s poems have appeared in The Moth, Abridged, The Honest Ulsterman, and Entropy.

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