Alicia Byrne Keane

Containment

The first health scare was spacious and ivy-mapped,
looked on to a tennis court, seemed to hold up my ingratitude
and let it twist in gathering winds. The second
had built-in fire extinguishers and glass grids on the doors,
a set of paintings that depicted angles skirting each other
in bright primary colours: threatening, vaguely Futurist.
Many had lived here before. The third health scare
tilted towards a dark wood wardrobe,
the eaves like praying hands. The fourth, fitted
with bookshelves painted robin’s-egg blue,
was a place where I knew my thoughts should be kinder,
rosehip-woven or poking from earth. Instead, I turned
all night, moved my pillow to the opposite end of the bed
over and over: sad orbital hurtle. The fifth
had a bellying kitchen and a hedge like stars,
a fireplace vague as mother-of-pearl. The sixth
yawned greenly, hung with old theatre posters.
The seventh was the one you joined me in, where we walked up
and down a bleached motorway to the shops, endlessly
forgetting something. The eighth a blaze of sun
through the lattice, an eviction on arrival. The ninth
is a lingering present and the gentle rise of heat
through varnished floorboards, perfume steaming
from clothes on the drying rack, is number and descriptor
after the sigh of the eighth, is a narrow vowel and a word
I’ve always seen as sunlight-coloured. Is a leaving as a staying.

Dr. Alicia Byrne Keane is a poet from Dublin, with work published in The Moth, Banshee, The Stinging Fly, Oxford Poetry, The Interpreter's House, The Colorado Review, Southword and Poetry Ireland Review, among other journals. Alicia received an Irish Arts Council Literature Bursary in 2024; their debut poetry collection, Pretend Cartoon Strength, was published by Broken Sleep Books in December 2023. A second collection is forthcoming from Broken Sleep Books in September 2026.

Alicia wrote this about her poem:

 I wrote this poem about health anxiety itself, as it’s something I experience a lot of, but am not an expert in! The metaphor of the rental property seemed apt to convey this sense of writing about a structure you inhabit in some partial and obscured way. Additionally, I often wonder how much health anxiety relates to culturally relevant stigmas – examples are negative views of ageing, or how people who get ill are still sometimes judged for the perceived neglect of their health – so I wanted to describe bodily fear and shame as these pre-existing architectures.