‘sunday DARTS and my phone’s dead’ and other poems by Alicia Byrne Keane

sassy ghost

sometimes I’m startled by how
perfectly my boots land when I take them off
in poses too outrageous to plan
like a dandy has strode into the room
and is posturing,
invisible,
in my boots

i can’t draw shoes it makes me restless
  (the art room of my school
with its swelling cabin roof
like an overturned ship,
  the teacher played the bon iver album
with skinny love on it on repeat all the time
  the song makes me sleepy and cold)

i can’t draw shoes, when i try they look like puddles or ghosts
everything about them less certain on inspection
the soles worn in places so the line will look uneven on the page

(the fear that no-one would know
you were accurately capturing the wobbly bits)

When we came out that morning everything was covered in ice

We talked about so much stuff that I can’t remember
Any of it really, just that I was nervous in a good way

And that we slept surrounded by paintings
You’d done on the backs of cornflake packets

sunday DARTS and my phone’s dead

sunday darts away from me
into a corner, becomes
an imagined dampness

like when you can’t tell whether
clothes on the line are still wet
or just really cold

I was meant to ring you tonight,
but I’m sitting in various places.

A guy says


people at the platform are wearing
green woolly hats in a great number
and it still takes me a while 
to cop that there’s a match on


	the conversation behind me: a guy says Ssssssssupermacs 
	because he’s waiting for his friend to finish their sentence
	some people talk slower when they’re trying to interrupt you

	
THE TRAIN HAS NO MIND, 
another guy says jarringly


(I think: eradicate all ringtones that sound like
variations on the old-fashioned telephone bell)

	
	the train has no mind. 
	the display has said 2 minutes for 10 minutes
	so I step beyond the line and crane my neck
				don’t jump! a guy says
				as a joke,


I look 
at the space behind him.

Alicia Byrne Keane is a spoken word artist and poet from Dublin, Ireland. She has performed at festivals such as Body & Soul, Electric Picnic, Castlepalooza and F Festival. Her poetry has been published in magazines such as Bare Hands, Headstuff, and Impossible Archetype, among others. She is a long-time performer at poetry events around Dublin such as Lemme Talk and Come Rhyme With Me, and was more recently involved in the Science Gallery’s INTIMACY exhibition. She is currently a PhD candidate at Trinity College Dublin researching translated literature and placelessness, more specifically in the case of authors who self-translate. Her work explores the absurdity that arises from losses in translation, even when interacting in one’s native language. She is interested in the effect of unexpected sincerity afforded by short, snapshot-like poems.

‘sunday DARTS and my phone’s dead’ and other poems by Alicia Byrne Keane

sassy ghost

When we came out that morning everything was covered in ice

sunday DARTS and my phone’s dead

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