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 –...

Jessica Traynor | Tolka, Issue One, Feb 2023 My first memory of my cousin who went to jail is of him playing guitar at my grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. One of my uncles had a job in RTÉ, so the party was in the canteen, a brightly lit wilderness of painted breeze blocks. The extended family were all there; party pieces were expected. I’d written a poem, because I hated being asked to sing – the idea of it made me sick with anxiety. The entreaties of increasingly drunken aunts and uncles to perform meant I had to keep roaming about the room on a circuit of perpetual avoidance until the time came for me to say my poem. I was maybe nine or ten years old and the poem I’d written was about a man coming home from a long time away to find his family gone and his...

Mae Graber | Tolka, Issue Four, July 2023 John Steinbeck wrote Of Mice and Men and then his dog ate it. I love Of Mice and Men. It’s my favourite book, and I love that a dog ate it. I wish I had more details about the dog to tell you. He was not John Steinbeck’s famous poodle, Charley, who there is a wealth of information about. All I can find out of this book-scarfing hound is that he was a setter and his name was Toby. For me, personally, his literary contribution blows anything Charley ever did out of the water. I would bet my life that Toby was over eleven months, but under one-and-a-half years old. I can suppose this with such certainty because younger puppies are too unreliable to leave alone with manuscripts, and John Steinbeck, as an avid dog-haver his whole life, would have known this....