Icarus Vol. 72 No. 1 (2021)

ICARUS MAGAZINE

VOLUME LXXII, ISSUE I

© Trinity Publications, November 2021

EDITORIAL

Icarus is hard to edit because it’s intentionally open-ended — there’s no specific theme, callout, or rigid guidelines as to what we accept for publication.

Because of this, Icarus is mainly a product of the contributing community, bound only by two things — time and place.

We’re writing amidst the demolition of the city. In the past few weeks alone, it’s been announced that Merchant’s Arch, Chapters Bookstore, the Science Gallery, and the Cobblestone will all be gutted and cleared out to make way for newer, glossier, more profitable ventures.

We are lucky to not be on the chopping block. We are lucky to be able to produce this volume, and we are even luckier to be able to distribute it for free. But the privilege of making work and being heard shouldn’t be something reserved for only the few.

This issue is about grief, distortion, love, anxiety, and home. All of which are things Dublin seems to keep giving us.

Briefly, we’d like to thank M.I.A., S.F.T., everyone who submitted, and probably our family. And absolutely nobody else — no, no one else, not under any circumstances.

ours truly, gabi + alex

Icarus is proud to present three poems by Kevin Breathnach alongside the work of Trinity students, staff, and alumni.

Front Cover:

As I Am by Áine Rose

Back Cover:

raudoni trys by Keegan Andrulis 3

CONTENTS 1

2

Saudade On Swords Road summer in-screen Google Search Suggestions After I Found a Lump <3 hiiiiii hemingway <3 PI$$ cockroaches House Wife Lettuce Recounting Haystack 2nd Ox Herding Picture Morphing #4 #5 #6

Catherine Ding Rafael Mendes Ava Chapman Sarah Moran

6 8 9 11

Ava Chapman CAWHILL Desree Susannah Violette Lily O’Byrne Charlotte Moore Maya Kulukundis Fionn O’Sullivan featured: Kevin Breathnach

12 14 15 16 17 18 21 24

Lady in Sepia First Death Mass in the nursing home Mother/Niece/Mother/Me The Alchemist Visions of My Mum Voicemail Radioactive Heart Pretty!Women!

Sirhan Sirhan

Ciara Fennessy Rafael Mendes Maria Cullen Sarah Moran Róisín Gill-Fagan David Hay Eloise Rodger Susannah Violette Maria Cullen Michael Lucy

28 30 31 32 33 35 36 37 38 39

25 26 27

CONTENTS

3

You have to get really close to the ground to pick up the Moon wasp box How to Build a Hero Jesus Lizards Marina the Monk Three Signs for Inna Gorenko Yelabuga Sonnet for my Sacrarium Grandad Races Pigeons Beach Dad Getting Electric Eating a Plum Umbra Room 12; for David M50 Blues

Maisie McGregor

40

Dylan McCarthy Gustav Parker Hibbett Michael Lucy Marguerite Doyle Marguerite Doyle Marguerite Doyle Desree Eoin Kelly Eoin Kelly Robert Quinn Anna Marie Rooney Valentina Ceolin Gindri Morgan Hildula Maureen Penrose

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 56 57

1

opposite:

Saudade Catherine Ding

On Swords Road

Burnt cedar logs scent flees from chimneys’ giraffe neck, its heat warming living-rooms filled with generations of Jameson smiles, marble kitchen tops pilled with gravy and sourdough plates, families embraced, longing the first below zero jab.

Yesterday’s storm lisps above the tar’s tongue — a beauty gloomy as Miles Davis’ cheeks — and checked handkerchiefs are constantly blown, as hands carrying late presents move from side to side, searching forgotten flames in shallow pockets.

Climbing the cold road, I glance a man manoeuvring a mechanic arm to collect shattered glass — he weights each shard as if figuring out a puzzle he used to play with his grandpa — while a breakless BMX lays atop the hedge, unlocked and exposed, after the rush to use the loo.

At Ellenfield Park, father and son are kicking a saffron coloured ball with all the time in the world, a blackbird shuffles his beak through a corpse.

An old pal drags his broken ballerina leg, his wrinkled face preserves a childish smile, and he whispers to his friend about the first time that he saw a naked woman and how he felt alive.

8

Rafael Mendes

summer in-screen

my father says that anger is a masking emotion, that if you dig into it enough you’ll find loss. but the more i dig into my anger the more i find more, tiny angers. popular culture / feminist thought like the influencer in yr head says i’ve been repressing my anger, pressing it under water. a girlish thing. to sink. but I’ve never been good at. I’ve never been– the flexing of his wrist fills me with rage. how he said what he did. the way she pronounces my name. they say when you can’t sleep someone is thinking of you. I get the sense it’s not in a wholly positive way.

I haven’t gotten the message yet. leave after the tone. automated voice message. voice warbles younger on tape. memories of a child I didn’t know. of human speech. of instagram captions. of frenemies. watch. evil twin of intimacy. shadow-self. drawn to like connection, like warmth. false light. false hope. put on your blue glasses again.

9

dig in, empty meal. dig in, sucked emotions. blanched. bleached stiff. bored but stuck, scrolling.

HD, hyperreal. faces. they look a family without acting like one. which is to say accidental accuracy. which is to say analyzing television characters in june. summer dies its death. apocalyptic forces, driving us closer. this is the only intimacy we have. incompetent closeness. look at the photos. I am still and beautiful. in that world, where I exist separate from circumstance. cut me out. keep me there. caught. shaking like a dog in the backseat from the vet. shaking with fear. shaking with rage. pose for the photo. pose for the photo.

10

Ava Chapman

Google Search Suggestions After I Found a Lump

How to give

How to give a good hickey

How to give up alcohol

How to give notice to your employer How to give yourself

How to give yourself a hickey

How to give yourself a pedicure

How to give yourself a stick and poke How to give yourself a b

How to give yourself a buzz cut

How to give yourself a back massage

How to give yourself a blocked nose How to give yourself a brea

How to give yourself a break

How to give yourself a breast cancer exam

How to give yourself a break from everything

Sarah Moran

11

<3 hiiiiii hemingway <3 hello, nice to meet you, i am the main character perhaps, even, the titular character. oh, you already knew? i won the place because i am the best at binge drinking and pushing everything down under the iceberg, cold, floating, imbecilic. i would rather be a tree large, leaking with light shuddering with every change every season, a challenge for children and a memory for the old grown over as if to say: you could last. but i am the main character there is a beautiful woman before me– i will not admit this. i will say something about how she smokes or describe her sickeningly. there is a beautiful woman and neither of us write about it. now the gruesome moment to generalize about the racialized Other, more Other than the paper-thin white men i drink with, these cruel observations clothed as fact appeal to the american expat getting off on being troubled somewhere foreign where he doesn’t have to work to misconstrue others’ speech to remain in the center. a more extravagant way to say i am the biggest intellect, the only one who understands, because i can only understand half the words, vámonos, necesito un trago, necesito, necesito la tienda, las mujeres, la guerra, chicos, el anochecer,

12

eleven years of spanish class which is, yet again, just the language of another colonizer i google ‘colonizer poetry’ and nothing comes up but my memory colonizer poems are unrelentingly beautiful these are the phrases i’ve learned, dusky, discreet, i never mention my grating accent or the bullet holes or the sunset. just the surface of things. i feel like a hollowed out grapefruit and under this feeling lays another one the world is a playground for my hardened despair. no knowledge of the self or the other. the secret delight of dissecting someone carefully like sitting down to dinner & chopping up all your food carefully into tiny pieces, never moving fork directly to mouth. but you would never use that metaphor, what am i talking about. you eat meat, you finish your meal. i finish my meal. medium rare. blood bursting between my teeth. strength atrophies, i get punched. i describe it in gruesome detail the blood, the pain, the afterwards. i don’t remember what it’s like to be human. i never felt held by my mother. this is what i imagine humming under every sentence

Ava Chapman

13

PI$$

14

CAWHILL

cockroaches for the men who scream at me on my run

In this movie, a person screams before landing on a cockroach.

Luckily cockroaches don’t have ears therefore cannot hear the sound, reminding them their body is disposable.

Desree

15

House Wife

I carry a box of baubles into the future, beauty is so light!

I tied myself in knots around a mans fingers, until I became his hands.

Counted all my skirts and threw them away, wrinkle by wrinkle to mark the passing of time.

Ate chocolate spread by the spoonful like love, it is, like love.

And coffee is the night.

There is snot on the rainbow unicorn, he is sick with a cold, like me.

And I am hugging you for more than a minute as if time doesn’t exist.

All those things I say, cosy porridgy words, syrup squeezed on top.

This is where I live.

When I move my chair on the tiles, just like pulling away from you, it sounds out like an antique accordion protesting.

Suddenly, then, my bed becomes a mausoleum.

And you go to work.

16

Susannah Violette

Lettuce

Why do people starve themselves of so many things?

Even magpies don’t like lettuce!

Does anyone, really?

That ice-cold crunch of nothing.

Lily O’Byrne

17

Recounting 6.

Campsite communal bathrooms

BBC Radio 2 plays smooooth jazz I wish I liked my body better So I wouldn’t employ 2 mirrors and a window Standing at the hand-dryer.

Tomorrow, we climb Ben Nevis.

I know I’ll cry somewhere there As a result of thinking too hard Seeing my legs move Being too hot From covering my elbows.

7.

Washing the dishes

We recall school Vain competition for ‘Rack of the Pack’, my purple disgust With the boys who discussed it And hearing even the girls say things like “It’s about quality, not quantity” To make the bigger girls feel small.

1.

Long Before Any of That

Outside maths once I couldn’t be seen Heard 2 boys discussing me: “Decent. Doesn’t talk much, but she’s got tits” I thought it was funny Mildly insulting 18

Not without a hint of flatteryThere was nothing more to be said about me For which I was strangely grateful.

I wish I knew how I feel about that now At the very least, it still makes me laugh.

2.

In another corridor

I remember once telling a different boy “I do talk, quite a lot, actually, to people I want to talk to” We became friends, a little while later He liked Pure Heroine, Born to Die and Vessel , So we were cool.

I have been narrowing my eyes at my circumstances lately Noticing that my emotional predictions Rarely line up.

In schooldays I found so many things funny that in retrospect are sad And a lot of things sad which, finally, are funny.

3.

I told her I’d not cry

You should see How in the night I curled up and whimpered Alone For hours on end.

On the train On the way to my vaccine I think of my little heart, its wayward kindness to her, to them. My forgiveness-invitations.

My eyes fill with tears.

19

4.

My card declined

I lay and sunbathed, Hungry in the park, On the phone to the friend who knows me best.

“Was it consensual?”

“Up to a point...It was my fault. A misunderstanding.

Nothing even happened, we didn’t even do anything, I can’t complain” I shiver in the sunlight and tread home for water, Pinning my skirt down longer on the way up the hill.

5.

Today, I saw a fish leap out of water

I thrilled at the very life of it, In the dazzle of blue Nina Simone’s notes Bouncing in my ears.

My experiences wriggle independent; Nobody really infiltrates my silence.

I flick through myself, Come upon a discovery: I would not jump ship and ruin the family holiday.

Somewhere In my core, I store a hard pip Of joy.

20

Charlotte Moore

Haystack A boy, seven, wearing rubber-soled sandals, climbing the third highest peak in the Adirondacks with his parents, the sun piercing into his neck - they did not think of a hat, or of the midday heat, or that soles with no grooves slip - falls.

The mother screams and the scream is whisked frantically by the space between the air and the ground.

The boy keeps falling. The parents are standing at the edge, watching.

The father presses his palms over the mother’s eyes. He will mention this in a local paper saying: ‘I could not let her see her boy smashed.’

The boy keeps falling. It is his boy too, but the father looks on.

The boy spins.

Why does the father imagine the son’s smashed body? Perhaps he is thinking of the avocado that he smashed with a pestle that morning and that sits now inside of him, bleeding slowly into his digestive tract. The boy had eaten some too.

The mother, in an interview a year after the fall, will suggest that the father was not thinking of an avocado but his fists. She will say that the week before the climb he smashed a glass vase next to her head, that he once smashed the boy against a wall over an unfinished roast potato and that he might have and she had come to believe it - smashed the boy over the mountain’s edge.

She could not remember seeing boy fall, only the falling, and then the hands over her eyes.

‘Haystack Boy Pushed’ will be whisked, like the scream, by the space between gossip and news. « This is spineless journalism! » the father will protest on television from a shoebox room in which all the drawings that the boy ever made are blu tacked onto the walls. After the fall, he will move back to his parents house where he 21

will lie flat on a bed in the garage every night and slash his legs with a razor blade. « Spineless, unfounded and cruel, » he will beg.

And will he be thinking of a child’s spine and how easy it is to crunch?

It will never go to court. Lots of people fall. Lots of people are pushed. We go on.

But what does the seven year old, Charlie Wayne, who lives upstate but has never seen The City, who was born in September and so has only just begun school, who is in love with the tabby cat called Marge that sleeps on his pillow, who has only once touched his finger to the thin ice of Lake Placid and felt that he has glimpsed the underworld and risen gently above it, think as he tumbles into nothingness?

My father told me this story when I was six. The Waynes were his childhood neighbours, he said. He had seen Charlie down by the lake. He had red hair, my father said, and a face like a dandelion that you felt might blow away.

I imagined a studio photo of the mother, the father and their dandelion headed boy, blowing away.

My father lived, as a child, in Upstate New York. His family were second generation Greek-Americans. Americans who have not always been American call themselves aliens. It was the only place for aliens to go, according to my father.

Aliens, immigrants, misfits and bears. And criminals? I asked him once at bedtime, before lights-out.

I grew up in the English countryside with my mother. I learned gardening and that feminine type of preening. And it is when I think back to my gardening, which was always performative, and my tidiness, which was forced, I imagine a second body raised by aliens and mountain edges. People, like ivy, can grow only along the structures that surround us. Should those structures be inadequate - too narrow, too acidic or alkaline - we might grow wrong.

Look at images of the thalidomide babies. Look at children with rickets.

22

I renounced, at eleven, community. I renounced, at thirteen, my mother and sister. I narrowed my eyes at the stoic, well behaved donkey that was dragged to Palm Sunday every year and that ducked his head for children to pet him.

At eighteen, I renounced all of the renouncing. I apologised, hung my own head. I walked with my mother every morning to help her get to ten thousand steps - my mother does everything by prescription and number for fear of the world caving inwards. She does not trust even in her ability to smell smoke or hear her functioning smoke alarm and sleeps downstairs, in the kitchen, as close as she can to the door.

I noticed the pinecones we saw on these walks and the numbered shade of her hair dye and the varying ways one can make sloe gin. I was patient when she discussed measurements and scales and amounts of sugar. We made the sloe gin and put it in the dining room cupboard. When I moved to Dublin, my mother - who had come over in a purple coat - handed me the bottle. You made it, she said, the gin a purple handshake extended from a purple sleeve.

Perhaps it comes from loneliness, or immaturity, but I have always felt I existed elsewhere. And perhaps this is even more symptomatic of loneliness, but I have always thought that this feeling began with Charlie Wayne: with what it was that he thought when he was falling and why it was that he was smashed.

And were his organs donated? I might have dinner with the man that, under a leaflike scar, housed his liver. The teenager playing flute down in the heart of the underground might be forcing, as he scales up, air through Charlie’s lungs.

And perhaps his grey matter, split apart, was eaten by birds to become, by way of magic and biology, egg shell and yolk and downy chick. There are laws about energy that state exactly this, that testify to a split condition and, from that split condition, to immortality.

And the boy stops falling.

Maya Kulukundis

23

2nd Ox Herding Picture

I stopped by the road in the pissing rain, acid rain probably, watching all the cars and buses and trucks, and had compassion for all my thoughtchildren and their fumes. Heartbeats like shrews in the middle of the street. Little friends, little beings. Our organs everywhere, text string to building, the world a blaze of Dogen-dewdrops, Blitzkrieg fear and hospice care. Fractured, I cannot discard, only transform them, shards of me in the sidewalks and clouds, we breath the same CO2 from all the books ever burnt, and bodies. Made of them, we’ve been here before and can be again. How else could it feel at once so old and so new? As if we were all each other’s children, and have been each other’s mothers.

Unhappy family for a globe. The causal structure of the planet is my face, enacting words, tears, smiles.

24

Fionn O’Sullivan

Morphing #4

ghosts do not react to the mirror’s slipping total corseted moans from the curtain covered emptiness pulsing whole theologies would you lick a Liffey swimmer? look swim into each prosy horizon annex a draft of would you be interested in copies? flipping strife around a mirror earns you less and yet (meandering a bracket’s field subject to the law of thought to adage bring across the hymn the shit that winning quills a lifted emptiness for lack of adage brought) bottom line scaling lull a storm of endless diaries burgers sprung from beef

featured:

Kevin Breathnach

25

Morphing #5

if pen tricks don’t project a show what sort of prankster are you? lonely veneers should converge greater pranksters put veneers in the seaming hardly false what emerges trapped light wept turns more wine carpeting your teeth

26

featured:

Kevin Breathnach

Morphing #6

in case you don’t remember not to lecture on a world other than the one standing

parallel to your morsels of grammar the huge misplace is an effing power the fine’s a mild death fear annexes oaths swimming all denotes no one is interested in copies any longer

featured:

Kevin Breathnach

27

2

opposite:

Lady in Sepia Ciara Fennessy

First Death

A wrinkled plastic tube inserted between her ribs drained grandmother’s lungs. The liquid was yellow and viscous — a trail left by slugs. On her final days she could barely open her eyes, yet she held my hands firmly, the same way she used to hold fine cloths under the edge of the Singer — lips gripping needles, strained caramel eyes seeing future brides, rhythmic right foot marking dressmaking’s tempo.

The call came late in the evening. I remember mom gulping it, telling me, how my orphaned father smoked wet cigarettes and left to dress her in red.

During the funeral, rules about death were first presented to me: aunts whispering old adventures of the deceased — remember when she pissed by the car’s door and it went down the street —, distant family members updating their lives, a queue of tears from coffin to plastic chairs. She was lowered into the soil, surrounded by Araucaria trees and Yellow Ipês.

As we were leaving, grief was broken and shared with the multitude. I laid in the car, and didn’t look back. Grandmother never let me go.

30

Rafael Mendes

Mass in the nursing home.

Prayer is heavy in this place, It clings to the residents like radiation, Once exposed, even years ago, It meets them here at the end of their life.

Mass in the day room is the only thing that draws the dying from their bed.

(There is always someone dying.)

In the crowd I pick out a lady with sephia skin.

So weak she cannot chew a wafer of communion, She drinks the priest’s words down instead The breath falling out of her wet and transparent.

Next month the priest will come again And she will be lucky to make it to this room, an invalid in bed, or lying under soil.

In a million years, the prayer, Fossilised now, Will lie still in the ground where she did.

Heavy, and powerful.

Maria Cullen

31

Mother/Niece/Mother/Me

Recently my mam and I were walking in the big city and she tripped and fell quite badly, in the middle of the street with a load of people around.

She cut her knee and hurt her wrist, and I had to pick her up off the ground. I walked her, slowly, to a nearby pharmacy and they let us use their little room to clean her up. I wiped the gravel and blood from the wound on her knee and bandaged it, kneeling down in front of her, her pouting at the top of my head. I gently patted the bandaged area, consoling my girl. “It’s only a cut, it’s put away now.” I then cleaned her hands and wrapped her wrist which she held like a kitten’s sore paw, and helped her out of the shop. As I walked her to her car I asked if she was okay, if she wanted to stop and rest. She told me she just wanted to cry, and tears welled up in her eyes.

In that moment I thought of watching my niece cry when she was a baby. She had looked so human, so full of devastation, that I was jealous. I wanted to cry like that, to hover my hand over my open mouth full of spit and wrinkle my eyebrows and well my fat eyes up with tears and cry out loud — hugely, desperately, confidently. I understood this desire to wail, to beg for sympathy from a known source of comfort, sure of the safety of it.

As I put my mother into her car I was terrified of her driving away, for really she was only a child.

But, being a mother, you hold your tears.

32

Sarah Moran

The Alchemist Whenever David went into his father’s house for the weekend he was going into another world. Dad inhabited a world of cosiness, of staying up late and of bourbon biscuits. He used to fall asleep happy, his only sadness the thought of leaving.

Dad knew him. Without having to ask, he understood. His mother loved him, but her time for him ended with the third trimester of her pregnancy.

She hated David’s habits, David’s weight - David’s humanising elements. His father however brought him to the deli for croissants, smoked with him, and sat with him when he was crying or aching, as he frequently was. Despite everything Dad knew his soul inside out, an understanding manifested entirely in small acts of love and kindness. As a child, his mother’s sacrifice was of course essential, but to David, inconsequential. His father however was truly a reflection of himself, and so he understood that the language of unconditional love spoke through details. Through coffees and talking, and through the safety of knowing that someone, in a cruel world, could understand.

Perhaps it is true that all good things must come to an end. Despite his father’s power for good, the sight of his dreams crumbling before him had made him irritable, bitter. And because of their closeness, because of their honesty, David heard and saw everything. He saw his father’s eyes brim when asked to pay a registration fee for school. He heard Dad sing Johnny Cash through tears, pouring his soul out through ecstasies of IPA lager and delusion. He sensed Dad in a darkened room, listening to the only existing recording of the noise of outer space- to calm himself after a cashier had been rude to him.

As a sixteen-year-old, David felt these complexities were a cancer. There were times as a child he felt he could have died of love in his father’s arms, however now being in the same city as he was stifling. David felt that when they lived together, he lived as a geriatric moving through a humid day.

Everything was uncomfortable and nothing was right anymore. He longed for youth, as some elders do. He longed for a time when he was his father, and not his wound.

33

Leaving for David was a habitual practice, and so after initial grief, he was beset by the awareness of inevitability. He stopped feeling loss and started feeling fucking stupid. Stupidity however can be quickly eradicated by good grades and fox-like manipulation of others, both of which the young man had mastered. David left his heart, his lungs, and his liver in Athlone and on the road away, but he moved on. His mind still sat partially in the stews of the past, but his body wanted to open once again. Good grades led to a good school, which in turn led to a nice apartment and city living.

Since then, David discovered shadows of alchemists in the men he lovedthe way one listened, or his traditional masculine energy, or his chaos or his pure, true kindness. How had years of layering complexities made him so easy to know? How in these instances could he dare be so honest? Why were these men he had only known for a short time kissing all his wounds with their words and their nuances, even unintentionally? Initially the rudeness of their knowledge unnerved him, until the child in him allowed himself to experience the centralization he had never received.

Unfortunately, insecurity and timing can attach fatal significance to painfully mediocre people. David’s vigils with these men existed exclusively in the maggot soup of the past. Such a broth had made his limbs soft and saturated, and his morals broke down and away like bits of wet cake. He did try and at least create the illusion of sanity, through grades and a social life. David’s morals and power told him that people around him operated based on artifice, and so partaking in said artifice at least gave him an equal footing. However, all of the morals you may have can vanish when the right energy is near.

These men were alchemists, operating in the school of his father. How cursed and beautiful a life it has been and will continue to be. There are times when still, David feels his heart beat through his lover’s fingers, the dance of life thrashing and wrenching to be free from the squalid syrup of obsession. The longing becomes too much to bear after a few hours, and it is at this point that he looks up to the stars and thanks them, because surely this must be better than feeling nothing at all.

34

Róisín Gill-Fagan

Visions of My Mum after Keats Through the office window, the specter of my mother appears her face sunken, her hair now white, in a pony tail – a stranger, whose teeth once tied back the tide, now sorrow engulfs, no it ensnares my fragile frame still coated with dew.

The moss of years cover your body your eyes, once blue as innocence are two black sepulchers just the right size, Inviting me in.

Oh mother my tears are the only currency I have to give, but nothing stops your progress across the cheap, weathered carpet foreshadowing every arrival and departure.

With my hand on your necklace, given to me before you became brain-dumb, I pray, I who see only the holiness of the heart’s affections not the still-born crown of heavenly suits, screaming scriptures from their lofty towers of clouds.

No, nothing stops your approach; you walk with a grace your years never taught you, my heart that you once carried bleeds black moist mold down the guitar strings of my ribs, but I have no song to give you, no memories of youth, no feather of wisdom, as you chart the shores beyond the closed-eye of the grave, where even my love cannot reach you.

David Hay

35

Voicemail

There isn’t life after death.

I play a voice memo of your giggle in response to my joke.

I fiddle with time, self-loathe, miss you and soak: an image that you would’ve hated, I fear.

I can’t say it enough. I wish you were here.

Your mother is fine, I go as much as I can.

I say you weren’t one for sticking to plans, since you just left.

Only you would’ve smiled at that.

The world is a cheap hotel, a doctor’s waiting room, an antique store crammed with tat.

I have too many hours and all this left-over-love, tell me, what do I do with all that?

I go to bookstores and pick out the books you would’ve read.

I keep them in this sad pile by my bed.

A sight for sore eyes, half of a whole I think you probably had a soul.

Since, I can feel it in charity shops, indecisive over a three-pound sweater, mossy green (the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen), but somehow sort of lovely on you.

I haven’t much to say or much to do, because I don’t want to be here anymore and I’ve got no one to tell.

I bet all of the angels are under your spell.

But that’s bullshit, isn’t it?

There isn’t life after death. There’s no life after you.

I’m terrified you’re uncomfortable down there, your bad backI heard somewhere you’d go blue.

I play cards and can almost hear you declare, if you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.

It’s really fucking unfair. I miss losing. I miss your quick-hands and bright-eyed lying.

You bastard. You should’ve waited. You’re a bastard for dying.

I’m ragged, moving pieces, reminding myself you can’t pick up the phone.

So, the world is just glass and I am alone.

In the hollowing, sickening absence of you, life is a film, I can’t bear to sit through.

36

Eloise Rodger

Radioactive Heart

That bitch spitting bitter-as-coffee blood.

It’s a migration of birds not knowing where to put down for rest.

It is built of sorrow heaped on the floor like laundry, or mess she can’t tidy up.

A not-forgotten war when she was born, an angry mother still shouting.

“Is this my life now?” she asks the oracle dark.

Death hides in her bedside draw like medicine.

But every time she opens it, it disappears like lemon ink. Ninja-death knows how to use shadows, and light. Death is a dappled wood full of anemones and ivy.

She can still peel an egg, is friends with the jelly.

It nestles in her stomach like birds migrating, not knowing where to rest.

Susannah Violette

37

Pretty!Women!

And we all love Jackie Kennedy In her prom pink suit How she screamed and sobbed And looked so pretty In the red red blood.

We love love love Jackie Kennedy On her way To Dallas.

38

Maria Cullen

Sirhan Sirhan

What would you rather: Be a poet or a military man?

Or perhaps a pariah, A slick bloody hound

shaking free from the salt in a

xenograft hole.

My lastmost and most lethal friend Curling up in a hallway to howl At the moon As every gauntish Lockheed leper begs the question—

“Would you rather be a poet

or a military man, Sirhan Sirhan?”

—And passes by

dropping dung for the heaps

to toe the eyeline Of the river to the sea.

Michael Lucey

39

3

opposite: You have to get really close to the ground to pick up the moon Maisie McGregor

42

Dylan McCarthy

How to Build a Hero

Some storm-grotto hewn of windtorn waves, somewhere a sound could lose itself; here is where a hero hardens. There must be rain, of course—water in which our hero can lose his sight. He must unlearn any human need for others, and he must do it fast, lest too much bitterness take hold. He has never really had a parent, not like that, and it is this childhood want he will need to leave behind, if he is truly ever to transform. Here, he will have to go under, come out blind and coughing. Again. Spit salt. He will need now, in his hands, some ship’s rope. Then he’ll have to look for something in the salt he swallowed, something hard and holy, that will keep him stinging, hold him above water. And he’ll stay and search until he learns.

Gustav Parker Hibbett

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Jesus Lizards

He arrived at the village where the people were slowly forgetting eachother—the Lizard of Jesus, consubstantial to nothing, flat as scalene matzah, all tonguing eyes and storms brewing over the Sea of Galilee; stuck with suckers to the mountainside, tempted where things fall randomly, the Ultimate uncannier-than-thou

Holy, Holy, Holy Lord,

Save us from the unrelenting

Mercy of the lizard!

It is improper that he should be so indifferent,

Lord, while still wielding such infinite

Such indiscriminate

Such empty Will.

Please leave him with the others in Gethsemane, where

He is free to crawl amongst the armoured things

—O, hush now, hush,

have you not heard?

You can bring a basilisk to water but you damn can’t make it stare.

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Michael Lucey

Marina the Monk Saint Marina of Bithynia

I don’t understand these spaces or where my body slots into this prison of convention, so I will change out of my red dress cut off my long hair and go to live in a monastery, reduce everything to a four walled cell, devote my life to the psalms of poetry, and they will say I read well and that I belong with them.

If one day a guest accuses me I will not deny it and risk revealing myself, be ostracised, until in death they will fall on their knees when they find that my body will not decay and its touch can heal the blind.

Marguerite Doyle

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Three Signs for Inna Gorenko Inna Gorenko, the mother of Anna Akhmatova

Once, on St John’s Eve, my mother braided her black hair with wreaths of forest fern and searched Odessa’s woods to ask my fortune of some crone or prophet. There were none, but the spiders in the old willow tree leaned down on spindle legs, whispering the child would be fire to her ice, night to her day and warned her not to pass the merry leapers of the flames on her way to my birth.

The air was thick with solstice smoke and the white heat of midsummer and a shadow tore the clouds as if a hand had paused the stars at their zenith. It was then she cried out in the pain of labour, burning her through, like a path over hot stones.

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Marguerite Doyle

Yelabuga Marina Tsvetaeva spent her last days here

It sounds like a shout, a burst of joy, the opening of a flower, a festival, trumpets!

Not this stone bench, rain seeping, staining what won’t give.

It soaks my hair to the roots, drips down my neck.

A fish with dead eyes waits on an unlit stove for me to scrape off its grey scales.

At the Ardovs’ they said I was full of Paris.

Marguerite Doyle

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Sonnet for my Sacrarium

She was sculpted from clay by her mother, Adinah. Given life as a woman on an island small enough to fold in half. With superhuman gifts that can only be delivered by God, Herself.

A courage to sail sixteen ships, to birth flags on continents with no wind. What she built was stronger than anything, any man could rip from roots. Her mouth watered children who blossom in her likeness. Look at her!

An arsenal of magic and redemption, A song in retreat. A scripture baptised in wrinkles. A giver of ceremony.

Eunice, sanctuary lives between your fingers.

Grandmother, at your feet I find my sacrarium.

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Desree

Grandad Races Pigeons After an early dinner Grandad led me into the garden, on the grey path, past the white chairs and strange plants to the long red shed where the pigeons lived.

I entered, they stared. One eye then the other, sizing me up.

The wings billowed and I reached to grab flapping trousers on Grandad who emptied the last of the grains.

At tea, he said that he races the pigeons and an image of him crouched beside hundreds of grey-winged sprinters getting set to go at a starting line has stuck with me.

Now the shed is empty, unkempt.

I know where the pigeons went and why the racing stopped.

But there are times when I sit at the church wall in Dun Laoghaire and watch the pigeons fighting for food— I catch their eyes; one, then the other, as if their grandparents had told them stories of a shed, routine feeding, clinging children, and racing a grandad, and they begin to fly, as if they believe this is the starting line.

Eoin Kelly

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Beach Dad

He stood at the water’s edge, a sickle-shaped hand over his brow, anxious to pick out his sons from all the heads sliding down four foot swells.

They were strong swimmers, from a young age they had been in Nippers learning to handle the surf.

That didn’t stop him getting his feet wet, wriggling free after the loose sand enveloped them; staying ready for the arm reaching out of the blue, wearing a grey (or was it black?) rashie.

About to start crossing the beach; eyes fixed tight on the break; he spots a caught wave, bringing the boys back to where they can stand.

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Eoin Kelly

Getting Electric

We were on before we even came in With a table set before I even sat down I didn’t know how to shape the cutlery, And couldn’t hear my thoughts over a voice shouting for an adapter up the stairs We’re not gone by 5 and should fly for 6 Distant cousin was killed by an electric shock —(before I was born) I’m bringing my DS and playing Pictochat on the plane Mom has the walls prepared for the week ahead, in the bag I love my speaker too much so I turn off the lights but leave him on The country is unknown and very hot, The right hand lane is for left-hand handshakes and upside down smiles But the 2 pin plug might be more efficient than the 3 pin plug I think Still not sure But guess how many times I’ve been wrong

Robert Quinn

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eating a plum.

In the green and moon-lit kitchen, i am searching — i find them in a bowl, in a cupboard above the sink, smelling of earth and feeling of sun. i turn on the tap, the sound of water (spit-spat) slapping at first, but then singing, loudly, joyfully, what a joyful sink! so naive, in its happiness, that sink!

The plum, washed, in my hand (my hand) looks blue and i am overcome by the plum, this plum! by the water, its song! and when i eat it, teeth bite it, tongue on the skin, ripping (rip rip rip) and juice bursting (bursting!) and fire roaring (bright, iron-bright), spreading within me, i eat i eat i eat it all, sweet on lips, sour in stomach, such intensity, such life, i take another. another, another. soon the bowl is empty. i let my hand fall into the bowl, trace the bowl, hand gliding up and down in its roundness, i think of a pregnant woman’s round stomach. it was a good feast, i tell the bowl. thank you for your children. in the window, something glows. dawn. the sun is lifting its sleepy head out of the dead forest, breaking sky, cracking clouds into pinks and purples and seething yellows, ribbons of colour, ribbons of colour, oh god! what beauty! i stand by and watch the birth of a new day. a shadow forms in the distance. i blink, the shadow sharpens. it is my mother. she rises up from the road with the sun.

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Anna Marie Rooney

Umbra The wind was full of April when your letter arrived “It seems, there are no umbrellas in the world anymore And people have forgotten They once existed” You also told me about your journey through Argentina the ice crashing down Perito Moreno glacier Your mouth exhaling warm fog like a burning nest How you felt tiny surrounded by the cactus in Cafayate wooden arabesques in the Cathedral of Cordoba Your new friend, a chilean who taught Esperanto in Byelorussia a crowded penguin Island in Tierra del Fuego The golden teeth of a Vineyard owner in Mendoza, smiling at you I look for an umbrella in my home and don’t find one It doesn’t mean you are right, I have always lost the banal things You used to bring me stones from the places you visited Saying they kept the energy of the site for years Testifying the lives drained by the earth.

This was before you surrender To pursue that fire of yours I want to prove there are still umbrellas in the world the store attendant stares at me puzzled Yes, you do have it, I bought it here last time, they were next to the counter She calls someone else, gentlemen here looks for a…

Umbrella.

I describe its purposes My numb hands gesticulate its shape in the air Sounds archaic, they might not make it anymore, says one It might be something brand new, things arrive here with delay, says the other

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I loved the fire, but I saw it consuming you Your look fleeing away Black scorch marks in the borders of your presence I would let the ravens eat the liver of who gave it to you But no one did, you could do that Rub your hands and light it by yourself Your body spread on the window sill, no fear of falling a bottle of Pinot in one gulp Bleakness in your touch Savoring delights and terrors all your own and me Unable to cross the flames I hire the movie Singing in the Rain I watch Gene Kelly and Donald O’connor dance with stupid bananas in their hands I call all my friends and relatives, nothing You could create it, encourages my mom Have you ever thought about it? I would be the mother of the umbrella inventor In a purple morning, drops sprinkle my window Tapping my consciousness awake The rain gains thickness Bristling my skin with thrill I see people protecting themselves with newspaper using brief bags, carton pieces People waiting for a break under marquees The cautious wearing rain coats, Hiding their faces under hoods In the library’s computer, I learn Umbra means shadow in Latin Explorer doesn’t know anything about umbrellas The only result is a software company in California but their logo is a squirrel

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“There are no umbrellas in the world And people have forgotten they once existed” An unbearable fissure cracking inside my chest, I can’t breathe I draw a detailed blue umbrella in a piece of paper I walk around the streets What do you see here, Mme? A hand transformed into an octopus grabbing my thigh What do you see here, boy?

Bogeyman under the bed, chewing my tongue What do you see here?

An invasion of ETs from Mars, they all look like Barbies A middling artist who let his son under the care of his sister, he doesn’t have a penny The smell of beetroot soup Cats walking over the water and fishing sardines in open sea A dwarf that only says “I love you” to his wife when he is drunk I don’t care if it’s late in Argentina, Peru, Sweden, Morocco or China, I call you We are the only ones knowing about the existence of umbrellas.

I know, a warm sparkle through the wire, dazzling me Let it pour, you say

Valentina Ceolin Gindri

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Room 12; For David

and Suddenly, I am reminded Of May afternoons that carried winds like drawling phantomed breathing And sitting in my starched little skirt With my small hot hands In my tired little body dark eyes turned to the wide Pacific “The Farallons,” I remember him saying, “Are a dangerous place to be a swimmer” (for the sharks and strong currents and deadly rocks, not minding all the birdshit) The Old Mariners call them The Devil’s Teeth A craggy collection teeming with the largest colony of Western gulls, multiplying on pure white rocks that the Ohlone called the “Islands of Death” before they were bleached from existence Knowing these things, despite myself, still I sat small and hot and heaving Dreaming of a place to sleep that knew the depth of feeling of riptides and the great wide lonesome as well as my seat and my heart and my hands and their burden.

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Morgan Hildula

M50 Blues

The car becomes my private space When I drive alone, and think.

And the M50 is my well-worn track Where my spirits soar and sink.

I play my music long and loud Nina Simone, Tom Waites, Janis too.

When I hit the notes, I’m feeling proud As I sing, whether joyful or blue.

And I cry my sadness out, in the car, Shed my tears as I drive the M50 Times I play Nick Cave, his Weeping Song When I’m feeling wounded or shitty In flood, the tears run down my face No wipers can slide them away They blur my eyes, these rivers of loss But I let them flow anyway.

It is said they’re better out than in And that crying is good for the soul.

But my memories fill me with gladness too.

Then I smile in the car as we roll

Maureen Penrose

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CONTRIBUTORS Áine Rose is an artist from Donegal, Ireland. She has a bachelor’s degree in Speech & Language Therapy from Trinity College, Dublin and a postgraduate degree in Fine-Art from the Burren College of Art, Ballyvaughan. She is currently living and working in West Cork, Ireland. Her practice focuses on the framing and re-framing of identity in contemporary portraiture while the relationship between her inner and outer landscapes is seen throughout her poetry. Recently, her work has been published in A New Ulster and Irish Arts Review. www.ainerose.com Keegan Andrulis is a pasta fazul enthusiast.

Catherine Ding is a second-year English Literature and Film student, born and raised in Hong Kong.

Rafael Mendes is a writer and translator from Brazil based in Dublin, Ireland. His work has appeared in “Writing Home: The New Irish Poets” (Dedalus Press, 2019), “Arrival at Elsewhere” (Against the Grain, 2020) and elsewhere. His translation of Brazilian poetry has been recently published in Cyphers. He’s a 2021 recipient of The Irish Writers Centre Course Bursary and of the Mentor/Member Programme.

Ava Chapman goes to school, home, friends on loop! Their only ambition in life is to have a little black cat.

Sarah Moran is a final year English student from Mayo. She has previously had poetry published in Near Window magazine and is soon releasing a zine with some top notch people. In her spare time she enjoys sewing and sneaking into the Trinity drama department.

CAWHILL can’t seem to face up to the fact. They’re tense and nervous and they can’t relax. CAWHILL’s like Banksy but with a big dick. CAWHILL don’t take no smack from nobody. CAWHILL steals your sandwiches and shits on your rooftops. CAWHILL sprints from Clondalkin to Sandymount and back every morning, screaming at strangers and swinging punches.

CAWHILL runs this town.

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Desree is an award-winning poet, playwright and facilitator based in London and Slough. Although “award-winning” sounds pretentious, she has on occasion won awards and that’s something her parents would want you to know about her. Aside from that, Desree has featured at events around the UK and internationally, including Glastonbury Festival, Bowery Poetry Club New York, Royal Albert Hall and Sofar Sounds and her work has been featured in publications including Burning Eye Books, Ink Sweat & Tears and Mindful Seasoning. www.iamdesree.co.uk Susannah Violette lives in Germany with her husband and two daughters.

She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and has had poems placed or commended in the Plough Prize, Westival International Poetry Prize, the Frogmore poetry prize, CoasttoCoasttoCoast Pamphlet Competition and appears in various publications worldwide including; Bloody Amazing, Pale Fire, For the Silent, Finished Creatures, Cordite, Channel and Strix.

Lily O’Byrne is a third year English Studies student who can most often be found feeling bum-tumbled and bedraggled.

Charlotte Moore: baboon cynic Maya Kulukundis is a fourth year English student currently writing her fiction capstone. She is influenced, of late, by Daisy Hildyard and the idea of a second body and is wondering about her own second body and the threadlike connections between one person and the world. She is incredibly excited to be a part of this edition of Icarus, under such wonderful editorial supervision, and has found Icarus to be an integral part of the development of her writing during her time at Trinity.

Fionn O’Sullivan is a final year neuroscience student doing a project on mental imagery, if you know anyone with aphantasia, tell him! (@fmosullivan/@ fionnmosullivan) He wants a world in which stem degrees foster emotional intelligence instead, and doesn’t care if that sounds impossible.

Ciara Fennessy is a fourth year student of English Literature and Italian and a copy editor for the Trinity Frontier magazine. She draws and paints with any and all mediums. She posts all things visually appealing on Instagram @ciara.fenn.

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Maria Cullen is a final year social work student. Her poetry this year has been focused on her experience of working in a nursing home and hospital during a pandemic. Maria thinks that some kinds of bravery are tangible and she would like to dedicate these poems to everyone who has had to be brave this year.

Róisín Gill-Fagan is a second year Art History and French student who still can’t really believe she finally got out of the midlands.

David Hay is an English Teacher in the Northwest of England. He has written poetry and prose since the age of 18 when he discovered Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and the poetry of John Keats. These and other artists encouraged him to seek his own poetic voice. He has currently been accepted for publication in Dreich, Abridged, Acumen, The Honest Ulsterman, The Dawntreader, Versification, The Babel Tower Notice Board, The Stone of Madness Press, The Fortnightly Review, The Lake, Selcouth Station, GreenInk Poetry, Dodging the Rain, Seventh Quarry and Expat-Press. His debut publication is the Brexit-inspired prose-poem Doctor Lazarus published

by Alien Buddha Press 2021.

Eloise Rodger still checks her cupboard before bed every night. And is concerningly attached to the idea of owning eight snakes when she grows up.

It keeps her going.

Michael Lucey is a first year English and Philosophy student whose dream is either to write something as good as The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien or to score the winner for Liverpool in a Champions League final.

He is desperately in need of some more attainable dreams. He has also been known to occasionally post poems on his Substack newsletter, “A Caracal Slew”.

Maisie McGregor is a third-year English and History student, she’s given up on writing for the moment and instead paints and makes small videos for her five YouTube subscribers.

Dylan McCarthy is a 3st year philosophy and political science student. they don’t know where they are currently. can you help them. can you please help them.

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Gustav Parker Hibbett is a Black poet, essayist, and MFA dropout originally from New Mexico. They hold an English BA from Stanford University and are currently pursuing a Literary Practice PhD at Trinity College Dublin. Most recently, they were selected as the runner-up for the North American Review’s 2021 Terry Tempest Williams Prize in Creative Nonfiction. Their work also appears or is forthcoming in Witness, Adroit, 32 Poems, MAYDAY (2021 MAYDAY Poetry Prize finalist), Pigeon Pages, Peach Mag, Déraciné, and phoebe (2020 Greg Grummer Poetry Prize runner-up).

Marguerite Doyle holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from Dublin City University and has studied Russian Language and Literature at Trinity College. Among others, her poetry has been published in Reliquiae Journal, The Galway Review, Vallum, Mslexia, The Ogham Stone, The Ireland Chair of Poetry 2020 Commemorative Anthology, ‘Hold Open the Door’ and the 2021 Dedalus Press Anthology, ‘Local Wonders’. Her work was commended in the 2020 Desmond O’Grady International Poetry Prize and her interests lie in the local as the poetic space and the Russian Poets of the Silver Age. Eoin Kelly is studying for an MA in Poetry at QUB. He loves Eavan Boland, Hop House 13 and his Mum. Robert Quinn is a final year English student from Naas.

Anna Marie Rooney is enjoying life which is so fun, so fun, with her mini skirt and roller blades on, keeping it light, like silk chiffon.

Valentina Ceolin Gindri is Brazilian and enrolled in the M. Phil in Creative Writing through the Haddad Fellowship 2021-2022. Currently fighting the battle of writing in a foreign language. She wishes to do to others what literature has done to her.

Morgan Hildula is a full-time romantic and part-time PPES Final Year. They think we’re all owed a bit more than what’s easy, and believe very earnestly in leaps of faith. They wonder if you still hear their voice when Rocketman plays. Either way, they’re glad to be here, to be learning about what it means to feel, and to breathe, and to love, and to desire.

Maureen Penrose is a Second year Drama and Theatre student. She likes to write a poem or two. She was recently accepted by the Abbey Begins play writing programme. She has acted in a number of players pieces and loved it all.

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MASTHEAD editors Gabrielle Fullam is a writer from Lucan. She runs a bi-weekly newsletter called Hands and Knees and writes for The Gal Pal Collective. Her theatre pieces, poems and prose are about her life. She is a final year philosophy and sociology student and loves her course. If any of her lecturers are reading this - give her a First! She’d like to thank Alex, dylan, Salvatore of Lucan, her mam, and a large dosage of sertraline for helping her be able to make stuff. @gabrielle.ie Alex Mountfield. Is a writer from DC. Works with children. Loves loud music. Loves friends. Loves it all. Writes poetry via email at @harkherald.pdf

featured contributors Kevin Breathnach is the author of Tunnel Vision (Faber, 2019) and Morphing (The Lifeboat, 2020). His work has appeared in The Tangerine, Winter Papers, Granta, Fallow Media, the LRB, and elsewhere.

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Icarus acknowledges and thanks Trinity Publications for making this issue possible.

Icarus is a fully participating member of the Press Council of Ireland.

Serious complaints should be made to: The Editors, Icarus, Trinity Publications, Mandela House, Dublin 2. Appeals may be directed to the Press Council of Ireland.

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