Alicia Byrne Keane

Sticky terms

each other’s one exception,
each other’s one luxury;
the words already seem old-fashioned,
we said ‘outbreak’ then like babies learning
little bargains: I blot wine from the glass-base
with one knee of my jeans;
I kiss the tin of rose-flavoured Vaseline directly,
there is something 1940s about this gesture
(reject the small riverbend of finger tracing lip)
friends say ‘I wouldn’t panic just yet’
& I wonder where the threshold is,
air pixelated with a bloodying orchid-faint.
It’s like I work to build up all this calm
& it gets knocked askew so easily (like a hat)
I look at pictures in warm rooms from 2017
& am jealous of myself
& am embarrassed for myself
(at the start I said ‘social distancing’
when I meant lockdown/stay-at-home order/
working remotely & they’re different things,
I’d say like ‘I’m away social-distancing in my house’)
I look at the solstice kept at bay by floodlights
& how the branches hold the rime-gold sky’s edge
in a fuzz of becoming,
& am jealous of the trees
& am embarrassed for the trees

Alicia Byrne Keane is an IRC-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.