Around here, a pause is always violet-coloured,
mostly strung on necklaces and crumbling
to sugar between teeth. The flowerbeds
new I think, speaking to headlamps
in their starred tartness. There’s
a way light diffuses across
this mess of one-way
signs, the thick
network of
icing
on
the
tarmac,
that crumples
my 18th birthday
to some archive corner.
I knew the scorched orbs of
streetlights, I knew the waiting
space of the estuary, and little else,
and that’s okay. I have come to realise
that was okay, I wasn’t so disastrous, I was
only yearning for evening to come and delineate
things. McAllister’s Garage is somewhere I have never
been inside, I have only seen the dim objects on
display at a remove, I have only measured
lateness by the sip of minutes at this
traffic light, by the red and black
loom of paintwork against
an overcast morning.
The bright nectar
of rain has
slipped
to
gutters,
the dusk is
powder blue, the
flowers are miniature
clouds of frilled mauve and
I am hungry in a way that I wasn’t
in those days, I make time for fortifying,
for certain gaudy questions. I know all this
could be easily a picture of a place stilled under
waves, easily a coral reef that thrums with biting lives.
But it isn’t, and people are driving back from the Pavilions, cars
filled with
the dim
rattle
of
shopping
bags
Alicia Byrne Keane is an Irish Research Council-funded final year PhD student 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; forthcoming work will be featured in The Scores. Alicia’s poem ‘surface audience’ was nominated for a Pushcart Prize; the poem ‘Cloud / land arc’ was nominated for the Orison Anthology.
Featured Artwork: James Baldwin Jay Armstrong is a writer, musician, visual artist and editor of ANON Magazine living in Austin, Texas. “All graphics are analog-based, circuit-bent, for the initial purpose of projecting live.”