Alicia Byrne Keane
On Camden Street
I think I’m seeing that thing
I’ve seen a few times: when the wind lifts
a pigeon-carcass wing, animating
what remains unstuck by blood.
With less distance, I realise
it’s an umbrella. Leopard-skin patterned,
the dull pink and black of an evening dress.
It’s the flutter of spoke and panel,
a seeming leap from the wet ground.
Of course, now, I’m thinking of that story,
beloved of podcasts and the LAD Bible,
where a man found a koi fish fallen from the sky
on the road outside his house.
I always think of that scale-scratched shape
by asphalt cracks and car bumpers,
its sudden milk-orange iridescence
and the riddle of the air.
I remember he named her Alice, an autocorrect
when, standing by an improvised fishtank,
he meant to type alive.
Dr. Alicia Byrne Keane is a Dublin poet, published in The Moth, Banshee, Anthropocene, The Stinging Fly and Oxford Poetry, among other journals. Writing for the Irish Times, Jessica Traynor described Alicia’s collection Pretend Cartoon Strength (Broken Sleep, 2023) as ‘meditations within tightly honed forms’, ‘painterly in their detail.’
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