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...

Eerie calm. A standing wave, a never-ending breaker on a rock cliff, a bass vibration that trembles through every cell like the mountain itself is humming, rain washes the windows like poison— Someone screaming, Fuck! Fuck! * What happens to your Feed after you die? There’s no way to survive that. No way. No, I don’t know know; I didn’t watch it with my own two eyeballs, but I know. Stop, just shut up for one second, I know. And so there’s this thing attached to me, this awful piece of knowledge like a – like a dead dog. A dead-dog piece of the story. What happens to the Feed after you die? When you die it rules out posting something like: hey I’m dead. The word sloshes around like a dog dish full of water. You might die, but your Feed lives on in a kind of afterlife. Friends...

Isobel Harbison | Tolka Issue Five, November 2023 The first night home from the hospital I lay in bed. My body had spent a week wrestling with labour until, eventually, the baby was taken out with a knife. He slept beside me now, breathing fast. It was a warm late-summer Sunday in London and the bedroom window was open. Our rented apartment ran adjacent to the railway bridge and opposite another beige tower block, the hard U-shape trapping the voices of the wine-soaked clients from the restaurant below and sending them rebounding upwards. I listened to the misshapen chorus. Having a small child, I thought, knowing virtually nothing about the endeavour, is like having the front door of your home removed so that nobody can leave unless some other adult is in there. And with this thought came fear. I might lose night. * Crepuscular animals forage and fuck at...

Darran Anderson | Tolka Issue Four, December 2023 The job was to collect memories. I hadn’t been back in town long and I wasn’t in much of a state to work, although I was even less cut out to starve. It was only temporary and I’m not sure there was ever an official job title. ‘Are you a good listener?’ was all they asked, which somehow sounded like a trick question. The job required a researcher, of sorts, on a Mass-Observation-style project, to be sent out to homes, pubs and workplaces. While there, I’d simply encourage people to reminisce. Each time, I had to roll out a disclaimer that, in all likelihood, their testimony wouldn’t be used or would be whittled down to a passing anecdote in a leaflet. Still they wanted to share their stories, in meticulous and sprawling detail. So, paid by the hour, I let them. The...