Icarus Vol. 74, No. 2 (2024)

F O R E W O R D

When Eloise was small, she fed a creature in her garden, whom she called ‘The Little Guy’. She had seen him living in her tree, which had a big hole in its trunk, and thought it was probably a rat-squirrel-man-bird hybrid. She mixed flour and water together, and flung it into the cavity with a spoon. She based her recipe off the gruel they gave the children in Oliver Twist. When her father said the tree is dead and will probably fall on our house, we should cut it down, all she could think was: BUT THAT IS THE HOME OF THE LITTLE GUY?! Her father, a stickler for specificity, asked her when exactly she had seen this thing. It occurred to Eloise that she had never really, properly seen him — only suspected his existence, sensed his aura and so on.

Maybe she had just been lonely. Maybe she had just wanted to be needed. If there wasn’t a fella living in her tree, then who was to say anything was worthwhile at all. It is a terrible realization to have: to recognise, at only eight years old, that you have conned yourself, deluded yourself, gone veritably mad.

When Charlotte heard this story, her tummy did a somersault. It had been a long time since she’d thought of her old tree-home, and recalled the comforting stodge of the sludgy gruel she used to lick from its rough, musty bark. As she turned to meet Eloise’s pooling eyes, the pair finally saw one another for what felt like the first time.

Occasionally, it is better not to concern yourself with trifles such as ‘truth’ and ‘reality’. Imagination can sustain life. Charlotte knows she would not be here without it. Sometimes, the most honest thing you can do is make a few things up.

These works pretend nightstands are symbols of hope, host funerals for insects and hold hands with loneliness. They camp out at the movies, long for the Old West and get flirty on LinkedIn. They are totally dreamt up and still very much real. We are glad your little stories exist. We all need them. And sometimes, they need us back.

Truly, madly,

Eloise & The Little Guy*

*Charlotte.

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V39

Keith Jarrett

The counterpoint of light, dark, and hope is a nightstand:

New

Night Stand by Caroline Cappelletti

green lamp, green cup, lighters, litter knocked over by the cats later. Days growing greener, wider too, and years, all those years of not knowing about white lighters bringing bad luck came to a head today. I’ll be covering mine tomorrow, burying the old winters and the white and the worry and for now—for the night—letting someone else make me tea the color of what used to hurt me: rooibos on our lips when the lamp’s switched off.

A Mother’s Dozen by Sarah Browne

Marble-topped island, crystal and a standing lamp, I lie nude on a sanded floor prickled by shavings and suppurations, it is a kitchen redone.

On the easel is your hand chalked into a shopping list Strawberries, pins and a blackened pyre the print rides straight into the headland of my eye like an arrow burying itself in the side of a mountain.

I get to thinking about you washed in white reweaving the pattern of your talk of the pattern of a nail twisting into pine blanketing your death-stilled limbs in a polished brass

Tomorrow I’ll sit with you and let my old life settle down into the archives. I’ll pen it in your hand on the board and let my eyes go undone. The year in burden goes and goes

Ripening like liver or luckless fruit on a linen still-life.

The threadbare art of motherhood paralysed by an egg cup filled with tablets instead of a seed.

I buried my love in the back garden, Using sticks as spades, leaves for the casket, ants for the procession, a ponderous buzz as the opening hymn. Sticky fingers from sticky sugar on sticky wings.

I had built a home from plastic Tupperware, I had built it from the ground up.

Earth and moss uprooted and fashioned just so, I built my love a home, punched holes in the lid and Carried my love around with me for the entire morning, An entire lifetime.

Sugar water for you to eat and plastic walls for me to watch you, It was perfect, it was all just so.

But you stepped in God, right in it, It got everywhere– ballooning, festering, And you know what they say about everywhere, you cannot tear Away. There is nowhere left to retreat.

So, I said “Amen”, I said “God Bless”

And I laid my love to rest.

Sugar Fly by Louise Norris

January #7777ee by Saoirse Dunlea

“If you stopped it with The classical allusions I could love you more.”

This is what was said

To me, verbatim.

You know it has always been my greatest pleasure To drive around on the knife Edge, somewhere between Life and Howth.

If I can only just

Repeat your words back to you,

Three times in a row, No one within a thirty four metre radius of me will be in hospital. At least for the next three weeks.

We will have vanquished January.

Quick as you can say Xematiasma.

Our predicament isn’t all that bad

When you see it through a hundred eyes.

What could I know of love when I was denied a classical education?

Keep the big light on a little longer tonight. Please.

New room, a museum of what is natural to me–cluttered with old skin, lost hair, scattered poem of my songs among thin walls, of my tears spattered and stained under false warm light. A place so my own that I can invite you into it, cleanse it to bone and let you look out the window and let you lie on my skin and witness it, and when you find that my skin is not me, I can peel it away. In a place so mine, what is the difference between my bared face and my paper cover and what you can clutch in both hands in a fire?

Can I change what clutters your desk? Can you build me strong from the inside? Can you tell, are my hoarded trinkets for you?

Real People by

Julien Moser

Could This Really Be A Strawberry? by Lara Prideaux

Zephyr by Liam Kelly

“Turn that radio down!” from the next room. She hated any news. It was a moment of change, he let her know from the armchair. It was a moment of enormous change!

The turbulent air outside the window indicated some kind of change. The leaves appear again like prodigal children home again for supper. The ground seemed more supple too, and full of life again. Something was beginning, and it was almost February.

“I just wish you would turn that radio down!” she echoed herself. They used to have a parrot, until her parents took it away for Christmas and never returned it. She had not spoken to her parents in a long time. They were ideologues and lived north of here.

She washed the dishes as she was told, but complained still from her sink. Quick images of machinery and brutal iron filled the largest parts of her mind, as the bits of radio hit her ears. Never again! She scrubbed quickly and did so with a certain violent edge.

“Today is a day to be remembered!” he called out to her. He didn’t know he had married such a violent woman – a woman who wished nothing on him but misery and disappointment. She lived in France for a year when she was just burgeoning. She expected them to be different, but they were similar; especially similar when you spoke to them in the corners of cafés where no one could hear them. Home was worse, of course, but the expanses of one European plain offered some kind of world beyond the pale.

Those French! Ah! she thought now, smiling a little. They had a clever way with words. That’s what she encountered throughout her stay there. She couldn’t ever speak around them, of course - her accent being a danger - but she longed to speak French. If only! Education wasn’t ever in the cards for her. Heritage and tradition made that for her. Even in that bold explosion of youth and culture which seemed to thrive in her city, tradition never really loosened its grip. All the tall fur-coated girls – after the escapades and the short hair and the cigarette smoking – all buried themselves deep into the comforting hollows of tradition. That’s why she was here now, in the kitchen, adrift in France, in another world and another time.

The Europeans were all so full of ideas! she pondered. The dish fell by the wayside, softly onto the counter. Long into the night, she spoke to ‘intellectuals’, lost in smoke and large concepts beyond their reach. They talked about time, and about how much people love dividing it up. I guess, one figure said, that we are all predisposed to dividing up time. We live life as a ‘then, now, again’ sort of situation. Yesterday, today and then tomorrow. Past, present, and future. Like a linear trap we’ve set for ourselves. She supposed that to be true, but she figured that a straight road can loop around and enter itself again. She picked up the dish and wiped it. She was alone with her thoughts. The kids wouldn’t be home for hours.

“We’ll be out of here in no time!” he shouted. She kept quiet, unsure if he was speaking to himself or to her. She knew it was meant for her, but didn’t know if it was to her. Sometimes, he spoke with the direct intention to bounce his words off her so that they could enter his body again. A response was never necessary. She couldn’t see herself getting out of anything any time soon. Perhaps, she assumed, he was talking about moving out of the apartment. She grunted, knowing she wouldn’t be getting out of anything any time soon.

A commotion stirred across the street, noticeable from her window. New flags were being thrust out of homes. Old ones were being put away. The public seemed public again. Men waving their dusty caps to men passing by, thinking things would change. The women on their arms, mostly pregnant, looked happy too. Posters plastered around town filled their minds and thoughts, pervading their outlooks and moods.

An ageing tree stood still, right outside the row of flats across the street. Quiet as a last breath, along the twigs, fresh buds were blooming. Carefully, they filled up with blood, red and thick. The tree would gather a ring for every passing year. There are weeks where decades happen. Lenin said that. The tree would soon find out that years can contain complicity. Years can be violent. Days can be brutal.

Following the tree, she lingered on its curvature – the way trees and plants and humans bend toward the light. It was bending toward a window slightly ajar. Behind it was a kitchen. And her eye caught the face of a woman wrapped in a polka-dot apron. It squeezed her tightly and had no pockets. She was scrubbing away at a tray.

She was biting her lip, quiet; and she was sobbing.

Keep Pouring More Guinness by James Forde

You took out all your piercings, because you thought about age too much

Buzzing drone men donning suits in tin cans

Passing judgement onto your coloured canvas You always found beauty in the bird shit all over the cars, the walls, the windows looking out onto the concrete cancer

A luas groans

whinging you to your door at home you fling the keys onto the kitchen counter

Megan you were

Always such a beautiful dancer

Midday Street by

Eoin MacNally

Walk slowly, consider separately

These moving, different bodies

Traversing shards of fallen sunlight, Peopled by wordless thoughts, Occupied by unenumerated worries.

A short-lived world, a flashing light-dark series.

Breathing in an outworn air

We hurry, dither, greet, ignore.

All summoned to some private end, Driven by a force currently unclarified,

Stemming from some source–

Whether poised master, warm void, Fore or aft–that we, traversing, forget.

Still, the brimming traffic swims, Suspended, buoyed, subsisting onward,

Our current–this glistening present–

Maintained like artist’s brushstroke, A deft brush of sun on wave, A sourceless oil-brightness, Dust-dulled, blind-ruled, luminant.

Walk slowly; be moved, and remain.

Cross this packed plane composed of a moment, Consider each opal node given briefly, Ungraspable, palpable as a secret dream, Before we return the way we came.

Gathering by Louise Norris

It goes like thismy hands; your pocket. Create our cloud of breath.

We skid on ice as thin as eyelids, deep in an infant’s rest.

Trespass the fact.

Gift us one chance.

Fear fleets; the heartbeat’s mould.

Ask me my gift. Open my palms; we take the same train Home.

Catch by Zara Kiely

Little Dink by Elise Carney Frazier

In the far-north of Lake Huron

I came to find my big self.

I wore yellow to hide from The enemy, And scrunched my face to see the whole of the sun.

When I found the boat

We rejoiced in the thrill of silence: (“OH CANADA, OH CANADA”!)

We went forward with the sound of the motor, fifteen dollars, And a promise to win.

It’s been a while since we went back together. So—

I’ll exchange hands with this mud, And I’ll stretch its body to my skin,

Until its cold, dry,

No longer remembers Its first form.

Now, why don’t you?

Yield to your shape, Crawl to the edge of the Iowa river.

The brown box is lugged from church to mud. Feet slop to catch a glimpse. Umbrellas appear to point and laugh, as each blood-pumping hand clutches tissues and time in its palm.

The wreath rings false in shape lie on the uncyclical box nurtured by showering rain.

Who determined an end here and now? That the fruit of the womb’s fate lies with the clay in the ground?

The sermon adjoins each fractured face

In prayer - It seems to take a lifetime to unfold. As the tombstones lean like dreamcatchers.

Burial by Fraser Cattini

III

Love For Movies Causes Boy, 10, To Lose A Week

by Hetvi Kamdar

Lighthouse Cinema, the corner seat in the second to last row, A crouched back, pupils dilating. A soul nourished by the silvery 70mm images needs no respite, needs no four-walled cage to crawl back to.

CoStar tells him it’s impossible to become another person. But in the murkiness of this theatre - it is so easy to switch bodies, to be disembodied, to not be. Just for a little while.

The brain sometimes still feels the phantom limb long after it has been amputated. After the click and whirr of the reel, sometimes he still feels the violent gloom of a screen long-faded.

A film is an in/out/in/out kind of universe, allowing you to pick it apart, digest it whole, let it rumble in your stomach for a bit, before you spit out whatever no longer sits right.

This anonymity is an act of undressing, of eavesdropping, of watching others, and watching ourselves, and watching ourselves watch others.

Boy gave up journaling because he could not resist writing for an audience. Boy has now become the audience.

He sits there in the back with his feelings spilling out, lets himself believe that he is taking on some grand artistic suffering. Watches the protagonist ache behind closed doors, cries for the wanting of it, and the losing of it.

The curtains are pulled back, the sun refuses to drown itself.

Boy has seen all the features.

Boy has nowhere else to hide from his own enormity.

Boy, now dizzy and drained of tears, stumbles into the holy light on the seventh day. How miserable! To be alive in winter and hold hands with your loneliness, all without a good supporting soundtrack.

A Homesteader’s Fable; Or “The Housing Crisis”by

Graham Kelly

The countryside is carved by costed convoys,

Conveying cowboys turned routeway commuteboys

From Carbury Hill I can see the pastures

Of my forefathers to my childhood past years.

I was destined to make my life here,

Working the land through season and year.

But my future farm was sold from my cradle,

A bungalow purgatory became my fable.

I am alone now, on every account,

A homesteader steed onto I must mount,

Canter to deeds left, like in the Old West

A melancholy convoy with all the rest.

I paint empty skies from an imaginary saddle.

A de-peopled pub and de-steepled chapel, In every town where banks close their branch, To there I set out to find my ranch.

The Way It Is by James Forde

That’s just how it is lad, when they threw pink paint over Paul’s car While ma screamed from the kitchen “don’t you know I have children?” They’ll be running to school now, Jumping over your walls

And that’s just how they said it chap, when Paul got pulled for selling smokes to teenagers across the road outside the offy drinking tins all alone before coming home

And that’s just how it is love, when the doctor came knocking because the neighbours rang up about the grass that had grown too long in our garden

That’s just how da felt bucko, when he had heard that Paul likes to dress up as a woman in the evenings in the boozer after the bookies had closed, he knew he couldn’t go home.

We all felt terrible sending da in to get you, While you had chewing gum stuck in your hair in school Knowing we wouldn’t be going to Game Stop for a game or two

And that’s just how it is honey, how it always will be for me, staring at you in your glass fortress conservatory watching the dog jump up and down on your knee begging for a treat

As your mam grips the juice machine, while your dad shouts at the Alexa for the news as you stand there deciding on which pair of shoes to wear to the café on Mainstreet with the overpriced food

The Hand Of Fear Is Manicured by Kate Moloney

What Does A Woman Want On LinkedIn

by Jayna Rohslau

I want to connect with you.

I want you to know it.

I want you to know that I have more than 500 connections and I will mobilise them against you in war. You only have 12 connections and not even a profile picture. A bit sad, isn’t it?

I want you to note that I look extremely ravishing in my profile picture, but also extremely professional because I had my photograph taken in a garden which also signifies my love for nature which is considerable.

I want you to know I am armed and dangerous. That I am a proactive and creative thinker. That I have hobbies, a practical amount of hobbies, like four, and they are diverse like my friend group which has a bisexual person. I respect minorities and aim to uplift other women. Save one. My hobbies include hiking because nature, and learning languages because I am ethnic myself being French/Spanish/Greek/Italian. Stupid American.

I want you to know that I speak all four like a native speaker and not in a conversational sense which we all know does not mean anything in a practical sense. I’ll go on. I have an excellent track record with customer service. I have interned in foreign countries namely America. My previous bosses have written me recommendations and they were gushing raving, practically bleeding like my arms that day under my button down. Now it’s scabbed over, don’t worry for I am not down, I’m up. For anything tonight all my lectures tomorrow I’ll skip tomorrow night’s ball. I will not get wasted because I value sustainability. For a challenge because I aim to challenge myself everyday

I want to see you. I have an excellent relationship with my mother who inspires me every single day with what she does every single day. She is a solicitor. She teaches me more than anything. She drinks less now, I think. It’s not always the big victories but the small steps forward, you know, and she didn’t ask about you when we were in The Bank on college green. Flushed cheeks. Small steps. That’s what my mother said, everyday emailing rejections for clients she cannot afford to waste. Time and time again but eventually. I think I saw you at Cassidy’s chatting up some bird. I took my time wallowing to the bathroom, shuffling small steps. I kept telling myself, this is what I knew was going to happen. I always know what will happen because I plan in advance. I am always right. I don’t care when things go south because everything worthwhile is here, I mean on campus housing is nice. The bike racks granted mine got stolen but now I don’t even have to borrow. It’s classic me. Came to college and got stolen. I always work through my problems. Falling on the Luas tracks, bleeding on the Luas tracks. On the bus for afters and you saw me stumble and I was embarrassed because I could not continue to romanticise my life when I knew in your eyes I was antiromantic. I had blood on my sleeve back then. Now I dress for work, not play. Everyone stumbles. You have to pick yourself up. I always remind myself to believe in my strength as a strong and independent leader of tomorrow. Me and Mom don’t fight as much nowadays but somehow it’s worse. I have a proven track record of research and an excellent memory. For instance, I remember you saying I dug my own grave and you weren’t going to let me drag you down but see here I am smiling, always smiling and congratulating on Deloitte and KPMG a beacon of hope and possibility so exciting. Really

I want to make myself bleed again. Would you wrap yourself around and invite me in? Wet and shivering should I come around to make this known again. Tuck me in like a little girl. When I say I want you to say it back and mean it after.

I want to hold you after we fuck - to connect with you. I viewed your profile but you didn’t know which is not what I wanted. I don’t dare to have viewed your profile but still,

I want you to know somehow. Really I have it off but you have it on in settings so when you view my profile I will know that I have won, that you are lesser, that I haven’t lost.

I want you to know that I forget nothing. I am highly employable. Really I have everything going for me. I expand my network all the time.

keith jarrett

Hide Me Under The Blood, Lord by Keith Jarrett

When I walk good & I raise my hands above my head & I have no glove compartment or bible to reach for

& I recall my father’s friends who were once cuffed & dragged into separate vans & made to sit on their hands on plastic seats, to lift their fingerprints

all them bad duppy still walk with me those of my father’s generation, self-asphyxiated down at the station

while my father’s father locked his children inside the hands of God, suffering them only to shuffle to school and church and back

& so I drink my family’s history black: the fettered Cains of my uncles wandering this unsettled ground from which my blood cries out.

A Planeful Of Scowling Passengers Will Be The Last Thing I See Before I Die

during fierce turbulence on the flight to Santo Domingo choking on my vomit in the middle seat of a back row or perhaps the steward reminding the gentleman in seat 43F

to not unfasten his seatbelt while he gasps for a last breath hail my death drop the finger snap praise his dragging voice disrupting movie selections and garnering tuts – rejoice

in the hurling down the aisle of my unstowed gratitude journal towards my mother as the plane loses altitude praise be the premium economy of her mortification

hit by its open pages and my blood-flecked sputum so bountiful while in my last throes & so worthy of praise my compulsion to gaze at the steward – must I appraise his conventional appeal as my organs start to fail?

hail this failure this final convulsion this flailing curtain down moment with a cast of cousins judging

blessed the begrudging belligerence of my suffering this slow acceptance of martyrdom on a chartered aircraft bless me the aimless mile-high departed.

by Keith Jarrett

[Meanwhile, in a recent scene of the popular series Men Who Can’t Swim, the sequel to Men Who Can’t Dance and cousin to People Who Block Passageways, a near-identical incident occurs, except the protagonist goes up in flames, hell is as real as your mother, the air steward is a sea urchin and there’s an extended discussion about Schrodinger’s fertility test (if your text messaging service is on airplane mode, does the forest even exist?) The In-Flight magazine profiles the much-awaited seventh episode which was too densely packed with all your fears – which are also my fears – and so it was unavailable on the drama channel at the time of writing].

savannah brown

…

A companion and I drove up the mountain

One thousand meters in pale winter light

The landscape opened its mouth

I had never seen anything like it

Snow clung to everything that existed

Sheets of land wrested into peaks

An ether whiteness

Unrendered

Stippled by colic trees

Dense amber-brown trunks with

Gangrene arms lopped to stumps

Huddled together like lost souls

At night a hallucinatory red glow

Cast across blank earth clothes

When we left the car

The air hurt

And cased my hair in tubes

A television tower evaporated into the sky

Went on forever into the next place

Growths of satellite dishes bloomed at its base

There was an immediate camaraderie

With everyone we met out there

Pink-cheeked and breathing hard

We were all thinking the same thing

…

Later I sipped steaming chicken broth

Oh

Lifeblood

And fizzled out on hot rum with cream

Night mist whipped across spaceship windows

Earth’s shivery machine awhirr

Czechia Travelogue by Savannah Brown

While I read on Wikipedia

About a pendulum that lives on the eleventh floor

There to bear the wind

We could hear it through the portholes in our room

All night whistling jaunty little tunes of suffering

And in exchange

The tower was sturdy as a good father

The shower water came fast and hot

I was comfortable and slept well

…

A few days before I came here I went to Mass

For the first time in seventeen years

Knelt during the kneeling parts but didn’t genuflect

Or take communion

When I saw the Jesus statues

Some crucified

Some open-armed

Over the snow banked roads

On the way to a town I kept mishearing as Lyric

It wasn’t the one clean-up Mass I thought of

But the seventeen years I went without them

My grandma’s mom had lived near where we stayed

Twenty miles from across the Polish border

If I grew up here I’d have been a good Catholic

I said on the drive

I imagined myself with long soft hair

Sprawled in a crosshatched cottage

Desperate to touch myself

But instead, like, going up a hill

Or pricking my thumb on a needle

Or sat on a pew

Wood sticky on the hidden part

Of my foxskin thighs

The world wide web flickering in and out of existence

Unable to really reach me

I could have been her

I don’t know

I don’t know if it lives in me to be unsure of something

Or angry at it

But give myself completely to it anyway

…

Back from Liberec

Up to the hyperboloid

Black chalk night

A matrix of snow diagonalized against the windows

Visibility poor

Very quiet

We reached the final incline

Inched

Inched

The tires moaned against the compacted snow

We stopped moving

Time did something odd

Then we inched backwards and down

A trust fall into the arms of existence

My companion wrenched the handbrake

Immediately I said what do we do

I’ll go inside

I’ll get help

I thought of my useless bony arms

The sulphurous cold

The guardrail half-there

But he said nothing

Gave it a run up

And we crested over

Just like that

Not a moment of my panic mattered

…

I’m always too shy to speak the local language

And hello in Czech is ahoj

Which I found impossible to say

For pirate reasons

Instead I tiptoe into interactions

With the nasal American

By which I am regularly humiliated

Hehlo

Thangk yoo

We hiked down the mountain on the second day

A little gruelling

The whole time thinking of the cafe at the bottom

(The trek’s promise

We can rest there

Warm up)

When we arrived

We discovered the cafe was only a kiosk

With benches protected by a plastic tent

The chill of disappointment spread to my fingertips

Through a series of gestures and sounds

We asked the man there

A toothless smile

His left eye seeing something else

For two hot chocolates

The man informed us

Through a series of gestures and sounds

He could not accept card for them

So we sat in the exposed tent

Doing long deep exhalations into our hands

Feeling stupid and sorry for ourselves

Right when we were about to start

On the thousand meters back up

The man came to us

With two little steaming cups

We thanked him so so much with our faces

So delicious I could have cried

A perfectly spherical robin ate red berries

Everyone understood

…

The last day we woke up early

To a red rectangle

Projected through the lone gap in the blinds

I dressed quicker than I ever have

Operating on a power usually inaccessible

Watched myself pull on three pairs of socks

Through eyes still crusted with sleep

And oh

Oh

Oh

Out on the deck

Morning had happened

The white sky cracked and oozed onto man

An orange soul pool churned beneath a crucifix

Pink mountains wore haloes of cloud

To look at it I had to sacrifice my face

To winds at terminal speeds

Only bearable for a time

So I kept having to bow my head

I took pictures eyelessly

Misted the camera round my head like a scent

Already trying to remember what it was I had seen

While still looking at it

During breakfast the fog rolled back in I was glad to have my pictures

That was all

We drove down the mountain

CAROLINE CAPPELLETTI just bought a gallon bag of old pens from an estate sale in Boulder Colorado, America and would like to make big things happen with them.

ELISE CARNEY FRAZIER is a final year student in English Literature and History. She’s not sure what to do next. She loves poems almost as much as you.

EOIN MACNALLY was born and currently lives in Dublin.

FRASER CATTINI is a poet and musician, hailing from Essex, England but residing in Ireland. He currently studies Irish Writing at Trinity College, Dublin. His observational verse draws influence from Irish greats such as Heaney and Yeats.

GRAHAM KELLY lives in the dark, murky abyss between the arts and sciences. He is a graduate of the 2020 class of English at Trinity College, Dublin. He divides his time between his home in Kildare and the open road, searching for answers.

HETVI KAMDAR is a Masters student at Trinity College Dublin, usually found lingering around Lighthouse Cinema with a wine bottle in hand.

JAMES FORDE loves crisps.

JAYNA ROHSLAU is a journalist from Brooklyn. She enjoys spontaneous bouts of networking, men named Paul and forcing her business associates to watch Saltburn. She is currently on LinkedIn, HandShake and various other substances.

JULIEN MOSER is a writer from Eastchester, New York. They study English and education at Mount Holyoke College, and are currently spending the semester at Trinity in awe of the Dublin seagull population. Apart from poetry, they love music, excessively long and aimless walks, and creatures of all kinds.

KATE MOLONEY is a designer, artist and pursuer of unsettling creative endeavours. She wants you to know that if you’ve never seen her cry you’re in an unlucky minority. She likes passion and long walks on the beach. Wait no, scratch that!

LIAM KELLY is a Second Year English student from Kildare. He likes to love, to people-watch, to be as comfortable as possible, and to dance outrageously. He dreams that his work may indeed one day enact or initiate his dear readers’ motivation to love, watch, comfort, and perhaps even dance, alongside whichever lucky souls they so happen to choose. And the choice is all yours!

LARA PRIDEAUX paints as a way of actualising her thoughts and intuitions. Each painting embodies something mental; creating a physical, visible space for it. In this way, painting is a conversational language for Lara.

LOUISE NORRIS is currently on a semester exchange in North Carolina and she is chewing more ice than usual.

SAOIRSE DUNLEA does not know how to be sincere, except through her writing, and even then, only partially. Having recently overcome her fear of being seen, she is taking steps to combat her fear of being known. She is obliged to tell you that she is a second-year English Literature and Film student, but hopes that will not mar your impression of her.

SARAH BROWNE thinks Sylvia Plath was onto something with her green fig tree.

ZARA KIELY is a 3rd year English and Sociology Student who makes playlists for her friends to procrastinate writing.

E D I T O R S

CHARLOTTE MOORE is overflowing with love and trying not to write so many mean-spirited limericks.

Her poems can be read on insagram @ccam_poems.

ELOISE RODGER is a gnu, she is the g-nicest work of g-nature in the zoo, let her introduce, she is g-neither man nor moose, oh g-no, g-no, g-no, she’s a gnu.

You can find her work at @eloiseiswriting.

F E A T U R E D W R I T E R S

KEITH JARRETT is a writer, performer and academic, based in London. His work explores Black history, religion and sexuality and has been widely anthologised. Keith is also an advocate for afternoon napping.

SAVANNAH BROWN is the author of two novels and three collections of poetry. She can’t decide whether or not she is afraid to die.

F E A T U R E D A R T I S T

PAUL BANKS is doing his best.

He created this issue’s cover page, the editors’ portraits and the illustrations throughout.

A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S

we owe our thanks to our wonderful contributors! our spectacular featured artists! our beloved readers! trinity publications! all the good people in our lives who listen to us talk about words!

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. Information concerning copyright and permissions can be found at www.icarusmagazine.com

if you believe in us, we’ll believe in you.

thank you for reading. see you soon.