Finding Freedom by Andrea Damic
Flowerbeds
After Jóhann Jóhannsson’s ‘End of Summer’
The camera makes a mirrored band
just above the peaks, gives the world a roof;
last summer all seemed unbowed,
the park contained secret immensities,
we sheltered from rain. I have not been around
too many heights lately, no cathedral hush
where one’s perspective spins – I would love
to take a boat & watch rock
seem to reconfigure, twist as we move. In the film
one shark-fin boulder divides the rush.
Meltwater churns, penguins fuzz the landscape
from afar, seem to waver on end.
I keep one eye on the garden outside,
bird-of-paradise knifing
across the expanse, rain-washed greens.
The dampened backstory reaching clean:
pruned raspberry branches left sodden,
the silver undersides of leaves. We can expect
renewed storms, pulling at the edges of things;
these days the fear flares in a moment.
The fear has cornices, the moment room to plunge.
The moment rain-heavy on its stem.
Sulk / sunlight
This brightness, citrus-sucked, sucks; I hopescroll for endings.
The sheets I have left on the line are already nearly dry.
Feeling them is a shock,
the dregs of my Lucozade Sport now warm as tea.
I have that schoolday feeling, the hours an ache I reposition myself around.
By our taut definitions things subside and deteriorate at once,
a mountain range hiding shadows diamond-faceted.
I wish I hadn’t let my solitude mirror this,
become extreme advanced sheer unyielding;
let myself notice how a house with all its windows open
looks flower-sipped, about to take flight.
Summer
Sitting by the canal
a noise champs, trainlike,
resolves into 70’s disco.
It’s the man in the canoe
or kayak, I’m never sure –
his dog slim, collie-ish,
sits narrow in the boat’s
knifed part, hardly moves,
a ship’s figurehead.
Every few weeks I see them
filmed in Instagram stories,
ruffling the water.
I never know
where his radio is, think
of the music as disembodied
parallel world stuff,
sourceless & gleaming
in silver-bright particles
(I
feel
love).
Learning Drums
The lessons will arrive to you at times
like when you are turning your key in the lock one night
and a bin truck flashes up the street.
In the amber, dark, amber, dark
you will think the movement of potted fern leaves behind you
is a ghost or even a real person, waiting at your shoulder
on the doorstep like a joke. There is a storm picking up.
The weather reports say it will happen
from 3 to 11am, rapid and concentrated.
Lapse
There are fresh leeks on the sideboard,
baked pears left to cool by the stove.
Upstairs I open a sketchbook,
make two washes of paint meet and seep.
I think of faint, concentric insides,
bonelike growth bright in the earth;
pear-skin curled between slough and crackle,
mothwings unfolded after water.
You don’t know: I’d blur along these roads.
I thought my horror turned the neon slick.
I will never speak about the lightless flat
where I lay and seethed. All that clasping
consigned now, I destroy it with a look.
The windows here are ten feet high.
About the author:
Alicia Byrne Keane. I am a poet and concluding PhD scholar from Dublin, Ireland. I have a first class honours degree in English Literature and French from Trinity College Dublin and a MSt. in English Literature 1900-Present from Oxford University. I have recently finished an Irish Research Council-funded PhD study that problematizes ‘vagueness’ and the ethics of translation in the work of Samuel Beckett and Haruki Murakami, at TCD. Authors who inspire my writing include Mary Jean Chan, Stephen Sexton, Jamaica Kincaid, Natalie Diaz, Nicole Flattery, Mark Ward, Alvy Carragher, Eva Griffin and Jess McKinney.
My poems, short fiction and reviews have previously been published in The Moth, Banshee, Bayou, The Colorado Review, The Cardiff Review, The Beckett Circle, The Scores, Orbis, Identity Theory, The Interpreter’s House, The New Welsh Review, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Abridged, and The Honest Ulsterman. My poem ‘Cloud / land arc’ was nominated for the Orison Anthology, and my poem ‘Temenos’ came second place in Oregon Poetry Association’s Fall 2020 Contest. My short story ‘Snorkels’ was featured in Marrowbone Books’ anthology ‘The Globe and Scales’, alongside the work of other Irish writers such as Dermot Bolger, Mia Gallagher, and Louise Nealon. My poem ‘surface audience’ has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Prize.
I have been awarded an Irish Arts Council Agility Award and a Dublin City Council Bursary Award for my poetry and illustrations, and my first chapbook collection, ‘Planet Tuesday’, was a semi-finalist for the Tomaž Šalamun Prize.
Further work is forthcoming in Stand, Poetry Salzburg Review, and Causeway / Cabhsair, and I am the Featured Poet for The Stinging Fly’s Winter 2021 issue. I have performed poetry at festivals such as Electric Picnic, Body & Soul, and Lingo Festival, and have had two of my performances recorded for Balcony TV. I have co-hosted an academic conference, ‘Out of Bounds 2021’, in association with TCD’s Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation. I have organised and hosted public poetry events in association with Poetry Ireland, and with the International Literature Festival (ILF) Dublin. I have also assisted on the editing team for The New Welsh Review, judging poetry submissions and writing literary reviews. Recent collaborative work during the pandemic includes a contribution of recorded poems and video footage to the project “Lost Together”, a short documentary series; I have contributed photographs and recorded poetry to ICAS 12 (the 12th International Convention of Asia Scholars) in a virtual exhibition setting. I have also contributed handwritten poetry to TCD’s “Living in Lockdown” project.
In the artist’s words:
Andrea Damic, born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, lives and works in Sydney, Australia. She’s an amateur photographer and author of prose and poetry. Sometimes while in the process of capturing a certain moment, Andrea knows exactly what outcome to expect. However, more often than not, that end result is utterly unexpected. This is the main reason she loves digital photography so much. The possibilities are endless, and she loves being surprised.
Her photographs can be found in Fusion Art and Light Space & Time Online Art Exhibitions or in online and print publications such as Abstract Magazine, Rejection Letters, The Piker Press, Mad Swirl, Anti-Heroin Chic, Arkana at the University of Central Arkansas, Welter at the University of Baltimore, Invisible City at the University of San Francisco, etc. Andrea’s especially proud of having her photographs published on the covers of Door Is A Jar, Rat’s Ass Review and Molecule: A Tiny Lit Mag.
She spends many an hour fiddling around with her website https://damicandrea.wordpress.com/.
You can also find her on X @DamicAndrea, Instagram @damicandrea and FB @AndreaDamic