surface audience

Alicia Byrne Keane

// snow-blind bulge of water

surface helical or like a

funhouse mirror //

on the hudson bay a pod of seals surround our boat

in their hundreds: i am worried the whole time in a way i can’t

describe: the presence of so many heads turned

in our direction, coming to their polite points. and earless too. (or I guess

the they have

ears but)

thing about that wait is you cannot locate a word in

it; you cannot strain light through its more porous

parts, it is just a clutch of individuals knotting their fear

and the sudden sharpness of promontories in the distance.

i won’t remember anything else about that day, except the

interior of a restaurant cavernous and spaceship-like, there

is always such a feeling of accelerated doubt when you put

your first foot on to a moving vessel. i always think i can

rehearse the motion, plan for it, or calculate how much the

waves would plunge at a greater speed, so those first few

seconds are horrible.

Alicia Byrne Keane is a PhD student from Ireland, working on an Irish Research Council-funded PhD study problematizing ‘vagueness’ and the ethics of translation in the writing of Samuel Beckett and Haruki Murakami, at Trinity College Dublin. Alicia’s poems have appeared in The Moth, Abridged, The Honest Ulsterman, and Entropy. Twitter: keane_byrne