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...

Liam Cagney | Tolka, Issue Two, December 2022 As Indrani and I sweep up the charred-black staircase past a precipitously tottering woman, and as we hand our coats and bags to the tattooed Garderobe worker, and as we slip into a dank graffitied toilet cubicle, then, buzzing to at last be here, sweep back downstairs into the bar, slipping through the chest-to-chest throng, all leather and beards and babble, I have no inkling of the paranoia into which, like a slobbering dog falling into canal slime, my night will plunge, because for now, as I glimpse Indrani’s complexion lit up George Grosz red, we are completely intoxicated by Griessmuehle’s carnival, the club girls in glitter-ball face masks, the sweating bears, the spilt drinks and music, a pandemonium that, after the quiet unreality I’ve endured recently alone in my high-rise flat, feels like a happy dose of unbridled realness. * It’s...

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...

Ralf Webb | Tolka Issue Eight, July 2025 People lose their minds on the first hot day of the year. This is a truth unique to these islands. Men strip off and light up in petrol station forecourts. Office workers on lunch break collapse face down in the grass. It’s a kind of domestic apostasy. Sun madness. Chlorophyllous delirium. One spends half the year holed up in damp-ridden, poorly insulated lodgings that the sudden promise of warmth, a super hit of vitamin D, engenders a state of temporary insanity so acute that it might merit as a legal defence. Things, in essence, get weird. Something like this seems to be happening in Wiltshire’s Bradford-on-Avon, where, on an unexpectedly sweltering mid-May afternoon, in the region of four hundred Morris dancers have descended, carrying percussion sticks, dulled swords and polka-dotted handkerchiefs to help celebrate the community’s seventh annual Green Man Festival. Bradford-on-Avon...