OXIDANT | ENGINE : Issue 10
Alicia Byrne Keane
Frame (difficult)
I am trying to remember what someone told me about whitethorn
flowers and thresholds, but maybe these tangled shapes aren’t whitethorn
and maybe this isn’t a threshold. This field-corner like a scratched photograph,
an overcast dusk dividing itself into particles. The twigs are a nothing, like
a whitening seam, like the lines you’d draw to tether a constellation’s scatter
back together. The flowers are already softening themselves in the blur of
any picture I would take. They are in the category of things that make you
feel like you can’t see too well, points of dispersal. And above everything is
lightening into arid escape. On the brow of the hill there is a clutch of wooden
structures, dolmen shaped, each a little trinity of things holding each other up,
and I know they are stencils or that isn’t the right word, scaffolds of some sort
for helping things grow. But with blue light diffusing through their absences
there is something of the graveyard isn’t there the stifled angle
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If we met in a park
how would we make sure the distance stayed constant
didn’t swallow itself like part of a word? Something of
time travel or the afterlife about it, always conditions to
make things a bit sadder. Unknowns are still scudding,
enclosed by the sweep of forest, night-basin where the
week wells and shifts. A face breaks apart on the lake
surface, becomes something like a swell of pale ribbon
stretching. This sibilance could be winter but it’s just
the sense of a gesture gathering, a swirled flock might
explode from the tree-canopy if I say something like
‘cringe’ or ‘lustre.’ Confetti sharp, tiny overdrive hearts
exit rivering. The crushed velvet of a Wednesday where
you didn’t need to be anywhere and/or nobody saw you.
I admit it, this overturned sulk catches the light so well.
Alicia Byrne Keane is a PhD student from Dublin, Ireland, working on an Irish Research Council-funded PhD study that problematizes ‘vagueness’ and the ethics of translation in the work of Samuel Beckett and Haruki Murakami, at Trinity College Dublin. Alicia’s poems have appeared in The Moth, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Abridged, The Honest Ulsterman, and Entropy.