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SurVision Magazine

An international online magazine that publishes Surrealist poetry in English.


Issue Eight

  

ALYCIA BYRNE KEANE




Nightshade


When I cut open the pepper
there is a silk staircase,
a healthy windpipe.
I no longer feel so incisive
now I have been replaced
by the fibrous dialogue of seeds.
I am happy, immaculate-celled.

There is a boiler closet near my bed
and every now and then it flares with noise.
When someone uses the bathroom sink
a raincloud deflates near my left shoulder:
we siphon warmth from an argument
painted in small, unobtrusive colours.

Thinking as a bud feels different,
clearer and hungrier
with my waterway neurons.
I pick up a scrap of paper
drifted on the windowsill,
turn it over to see
the smallest picture possible,
a raspberry pillowed in leaves.
I realise this is the tab from a jam jar,
some pretty part
for sealing freshness in.
I can write all this, somehow.
My fingertips are still normal sized.





Alicia Byrne Keane is a final-year PhD student at Trinity College Dublin. Her poems appear in The Cardiff Review, Entropy, Abridged, The Honest Ulsterman, The Moth, and The Berkeley Poetry Review; she also has work forthcoming in The Colorado Review.





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