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.