After Leah Barclay’s ‘Migration Patterns: Saltwater’

The sound has a cataclysm to it
crackable & pert, blueberry or hazelnut
on a tongue, a sense organ itself bowl-steadied,
becoming acceptable. There is a coo or a crinkling;
a keen; a cooling tree canopy or river-shallow in which
we keep all our roundest mutterings cupped. We are rounding up;
the fright becoming a chain of recorded dusks & they go so well with the last
sun-dapplings reordering themselves on grey carpet; the Arctic storm
they say has been coming for days, smattered to us here
in surprising gusts. The end of the sound file is a gem
or a dwindling, seems to twirl.

***

Alicia Byrne Keane is a final year PhD student at Trinity College Dublin, having completed a MSt. in English Literature 1900-Present at Oxford. Alicia’s poetry has been published in The Moth, The Colorado Review, The Cardiff Review, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Banshee, Abridged, and Entropy, among others; the poem ‘surface audience’ has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.