Isobel Harbison | Tolka Issue Five, November 2023 The first night home from the hospital I lay in bed. My body had spent a week wrestling with labour until, eventually, the baby was taken out with a knife. He slept beside me now, breathing fast. It was a warm late-summer Sunday in London and the bedroom window was open. Our rented apartment ran adjacent to the railway bridge and opposite another beige tower block, the hard U-shape trapping the voices of the wine-soaked clients from the restaurant below and sending them rebounding upwards. I listened to the misshapen chorus. Having a small child, I thought, knowing virtually nothing about the endeavour, is like having the front door of your home removed so that nobody can leave unless some other adult is in there. And with this thought came fear. I might lose night. * Crepuscular animals forage and fuck at...

Brecken Hancock | Tolka Issue Two, August 2024 I take my phone to bed – my husband on one side, my cell on the other. I face my cell. * It starts with a skim of scalp. The cadaver of a Texan murderer who died of lethal injection was encased and frozen in gelatine, then ground down on the axial plane, one millimetre at a time. Photographs of his 1,871 cryosections compile like leaves of a book; a stack of rectos; a secret turf of nerves (stubs of axons and dendritic miles); atrial chambers; a bog of colon; fat; furls of brain; and tendons, imprecisely milled, smeared across the surfaces. * He wasn’t sliced. In a university lab in Denver, a motorised, rotating disk of sandpaper scoured him away, turning him to frozen, cadaveric dust. * Each milling of his corpse revealed an aerial view of viscera – a slab...

Mícheál McCann | Tolka Issue Five, June 2024 Derek Jarman’s The Tempest (1979) has almost ended. Miranda and Ferdinand are in wedding garb. A band of white-suited sailors loiter gayly. The set is aristocratic and regal. The frame fills with confetti of such colour that the screen becomes momentarily blocked with a pastel pink. The confetti thins, carpeting the entire set, to reveal a figure in golds and yellow helmeted with a pearl-gold bonnet from which stem seven white-gold feathers; discs of translucent lemon fabric imitate the dawn rising behind her. This is the Goddess come to bless the wedding party, yet it is her rendition of the torch song ‘Stormy Weather’ that haunts my imagination most. The lyrics are smoky and sad; her face is lit by an eerie smile. I lie awake later that evening thinking of the lilting sailors, Welch dwarfed between them, beaming as she sings....

Mark O’Connell | Tolka, Issue Four, June 2023 For nine years, from 2013 until the start of this year, I lived with my family in Stoneybatter. Most mornings, if it wasn’t raining, I would walk my son to school on the far side of the Liffey. As we crossed the quays my attention would often be drawn towards a four-storey red-brick building, which was the only remaining Georgian house in a row of humbler buildings – a low, squat car-upholstery business on one side and a block of modern apartments on the other. Always the house was unlit from within, and unoccupied. Its windows were thickly grimed with dirt from the heavy passing traffic. The granite steps up to its arched and fan-lit front door were sprouting grass and weeds. When I looked down over its railings into its basement entrance, I often saw piles of miscellaneous urban flotsam –...