Kimberly Campanello | Tolka Issue Five, August 2024 K. arrives at the cottage first. It is still covered in red, white and blue bunting a month after the jubilee, as are the rows of cottages and the detached houses in the village, the community centre with the yoga class, the café with decent coffee, the shop selling basics including newspapers and artisan local products, and the three pubs triangulating the square – one standard fare, one gastro, one wood-fired pizza. These amenities had been advertised in the house’s listing, which pinpointed their distance from the doorstep in fractions of a mile. The local walks in the famous landscape were also listed, including one that takes you up to a twelfth-century shrine to the Virgin Mary that had been restored and reopened to pilgrims in 1961 after centuries of ruin. This and other walks are circular or could be made that...

Eimear Arthur | Tolka Issue Eight, September 2025 Off the northwest coast of Ireland, between the white sands of Trá Bhán and the Atlantic’s roiling waves, there is a rocky islet, approximately 150 metres long and 100 metres wide, marked on Google Maps as Illanamarve. The islet transforms depending on point of observation: from certain parts of the surrounding landscape, it presents as one of the many promontories edging the shore, from other angles, it’s clearly a place distinct. Though visible from most nearby towns, such as Annagry and Carrickfinn, at closer range Illanamarve is intermittently blocked from view by rising topography. Just as you catch sight of it, you lose it again. Composed almost entirely of granite, the island has a shallow covering of soil and grass but is devoid of trees or shrubbery. The route from Trá Bhán to the island – passable only at low tide –...

Walter Siti | Translated by Brian Robert Moore | Tolka Issue Five, December 2023 First came the disappointment of Castro, in the sense of San Francisco. My friend who teaches at Stanford got a house just a few blocks from the famously gay-majority neighborhood – a beautiful two-storey place, with a sloping roof and uncultivated garden, separated only by a hill, and by a couple of traffic lights, from the Elysium I dreamed of in my youth, that miraculous quadrangle where powerful, half-naked athletes strolled around, kissing each other. The most beautiful ones made love the most and have therefore died; now there’s only an occasional old bodybuilder in overalls, a sick bison with a bottle of milk in hand, along the boulevard where small-town fairies walk looking lost like tourists on Via Veneto. In Stanford’s Andalusian alcazar, Japanese couples go to get married on Sunday, while at the foul-smelling...

The Hanged Man I associate the tarot with my early teenage years, a particularly disempowered time when there was nothing to do but when every moment was saturated with an indefinable yearning. At fourteen, I couldn’t even get a job as a lounge girl in the local pub, the means by which most of my friends gained some independence, working there after school and sneaking drinks with the barmen after closing. I wandered around town with my printed-out CVs, dropping them in front of managers who binned them as soon as I left the shop. In those days, time stretched and warped around us. We were waiting for something external to come and change our lives. The tarot promised us a message from the beyond. The Hanged Man smiles as he hangs upside down. I often drew this card as a teenager, and his expression troubled me. That (ironic?) smile...