Irlanda

KISSED I am fifteen, smoking in a hay barn with a boy I hardly know, the day stretched behind us, the fall of evening passing shadows through gaps in corrugated tin. It is madness, this risk too far, as I taste the smoke-spill on his mouth and wonder at the old man’s dog outside on the concrete, untroubled by the fading light. BESADA Tengo quince, fumo en un granero de heno con un chico que apenas conozco. El día se alarga detrás de nosotros, la caída de la tarde...

NEITHER HERE NOR THERE Between nations, between desires, between the warm glow of memory and the colding embers of here and now, between crinkle-cut Kodak snapshots of rain-soaked outings to Tramore Strand, and knife-sharp, digital images of yet another place that isn’t Ballybricken Square, I dither in an ocean of indecision; flounder between the here of ‘now’ and a ‘then’, of soft, sepia recall; no raft, no tide or current to ferry my changeling self, back to its beginnings or bear the weight of this nagging, leaden fear, that...