Eva O’Connor | Tolka, Issue One, May 2021 7.35 a.m. Running, not walking. By necessity, not choice. My bones still infused with sleep, wound and bound in layers of ancient T-shirts. Leggings exhausted, puckered at the knees. Puffa jacket oozing feathers as I pant, spliced open that time I drunkenly slid down a pebble-dash wall outside some nightclub. Back when there were nightclubs. The shins on me are screaming with the splints. R. is dressed for work. Black on black on black. Everything declares neat. Mary Poppins boots, double-knotted with precision, at her slender ankles (she has always had ankles like baby trees). In her proximity I am blurry and vague. She blinks at me, X-raying my soul, and her face scrunches into a smile. Suddenly R. is six again, grinning up from a Coco Pops bowl, peering down from a gnarled apple tree, side-eying me from behind a pair...

Erin Dorney | Tolka Issue Three, January 2025 Day 3 Dear Adriene, Female bears sleep right through birth. You say, give your littlebelly a pet – you say, smear a little honey across the ribcage – butvisualise for me waking up, unaware of any sign of danger, withsore teats and tiny eyes you can’t escape. I’ve never wanted notto be a mother more than now, half-asleep with heat. Instead,I claim this fusty cave, a lunar flag ‘waving’. You say, notice howyou feel, and I assure you, I’ve been trying. Day 4 Dear Adriene, Teach me how to talk to invisible things. How to measureshoreline length. Focus on a steady state. How can some thingstwist in my mind like morning glories? I think I am invasive.I keep saying no but you grow into all my empty spaces. Dearones, how you multiply. Day 21 Dear Adriene, What are you waiting for? A...

Roisin Kiberd | Tolka, Issue Two, May 2022 T+1 minute Static shots of a rocket in a Texan desert. The broadcast is live, backgrounded by the gentle hum of engines. Six bodies are huddled inside the capsule; three men, fifty-seven, fifty-three and eighteen, and an eighty-two-year-old woman. They crossed the bridge, rang a silver bell, strapped in, and endured the countdown. Now they will be blasted into the sky, so far as to glimpse a fleeting oblivion. Regret and possibility collapse as they depart the earth. The flames press down, the rocket jolts, and it feels like they’re soaring out of hell. News journalists and bystanders gather on tarmac some distance away. On YouTube, a commenter types ‘With that ship design, Bezos seems like he is trying to compensate for something.’ Everything here he has paid for; the richest man on earth and, soon, somewhere off-earth, too, on the way...

Catherine Hearn | Tolka, Web Only, July 2025 Having finished their new short story collection in almost one sitting, I was very glad to have the opportunity to speak with Liadan Ní Chuinn about their writing. Every One Still Here (2025) published by The Stinging Fly Press in March and Granta Books in July, has already been described by Kevin Power ‘as among the best Irish books of the 21st century’. The collection is tied together by themes of grief and haunting; the ways that the past is ever-present, as the title alludes towards. These are stories of fragile, palpable lives being played out in a supposedly post-Troubles North of Ireland. In ‘We All Go’ a young medical student grieves for his father and attempts to unearth fragments of the life he lived and the violence he endured at the hands of the British state. In ‘Russia’, complex issues of...