Bureaucracies of Water

I’ve been reading about ghost apples.
They are a real phenomenon, like how
everyone we can see on the wide street
outside this building is still living,
managing thus far, attending appointments,
the fissures in their teeth holding sugar
or leaf-fibre. A ghost apple
is something the name of which I keep
forgetting so I call them glass apples instead,
which is more what they look like.
During a cold snap, fruit breaks
under its own skin; rain settles solid
as information. It takes more for an apple
to freeze, compared to water.
Lower temperature, an increase of nights.
So the flesh falls away & the ice remains,
pitted as an Autumn made of breath
or so it seems, the stalk and branch
leading to cloud-crater, iridescent air.
When we went to the sandspit island
to see our city mirrored, lights wavering
by the bulk of the docks, we each spoke
only briefly from the wind-whip of our bikes
of the lake that was forming there
among dun reeds, tenuous dunes.
This place floodplain & changing shape
from the beginning. A puddle joins another
to become rippled azure, the land
a surprised letter with absence in its middle:
p peninsula, b breakers, d disappearance.

Dr. Alicia Byrne Keane‘s poetry has been published in The Stinging Fly, Oxford Poetry and Poetry Ireland Review, among other journals. Alicia’s second collection is forthcoming from Broken Sleep Books in autumn 2026.