Embedded Files
Glitter: A Hauntology
i. Keep in a cool dark place
Tests of how a substance
breaks down, I read, do not
mimic real conditions
with their chill of mud.
Still, more voices chime: this
as against walls of flame, roaring.
Opposing thought: it’s worse
that glitter is fragmented
to begin with, gone micro
somewhere prior to the hiss
of reaching skin. I have heard
that claims of compostable
are a lie when the sparkle
is falling from a body
down a plughole.
A rejoinder, then, calling it
trivial, a stop-and-start thing
already, its abbreviation
sad and wiped: one or two
green-purple glints by a hairline
gaudy in a kitchen’s normal light.
ii. Gently remove any excess
There was that
pipefish I rescued
like a thread
of blue light trapped.
Me, five years old
with a yellow plastic net
& rounded shoes,
anemones crashed
meteorites, the smell
of the rotting wild.
Thrown into the sea
it drifted rigid
on one side
before darting away,
like the ghost
of the rockpool
had chased the length
of its body & dispersed.
iii. Whenever you want to sparkle
I think of all the glitter that stays put
and all the glitter that sluices through unknown water.
Glitter like a sea mid-swell, suspended
beneath the surface of a turquoise bowling ball
in the echoing dark of the UCI Coolock,
all the styles coming back with flared regularity.
The party-streamer 90’s dispensed with then,
just a pop now and again of azure sunglasses, the trends
vast and unending ’til they end.
Sometimes I make lists of everything I could give up
like a test: shampoo? Any takeaway coffee?
Fruit sugars? No electric light in summer, use only candles?
Really I am saying: more days in this house,
a necklace bought years ago
draped on the tiles of the bathroom windowsill,
particles of a dream held in glass.
I know that when I write if it lives inside an object
when I write if it scatters I am writing about fear
which makes things no less true.
I know that when I think of a pulpless fruit
called the marble berry with its crow-feather iridescence
I am being both sparkle and adhesive, caught between
the personal responsibility and the systemic crushing.
Did you know some of the world’s first glitter
was made from beetle wings? How relatable it is
to have wanted like that. How we adorned ourselves
with what once made flight possible.
Dr Alicia Byrne Keane is a poet from Dublin, with work published in The Moth, Banshee, The Stinging Fly, Oxford Poetry, The Colorado Review, Southword and Poetry Ireland Review, among other journals. Further poems are forthcoming from berlin lit and Magma. Alicia’s writing has been supported by the Irish Research Council, the Irish Arts Council, Dublin County Council and Fingal County Council. Alicia’s debut poetry collection, Pretend Cartoon Strength, was published by Broken Sleep Books in December 2023; a second collection is forthcoming from the same publisher in September 2026. Alicia’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the Best New Poets anthology and the Best of the Net anthology, and have placed as finalist for the Vallum Chapbook Award.
Copyright © 2026 by Alicia Byrne Keane, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
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