Not finding a four-leaf clover in the playground. Taking two leaves off one clover and holding the stalk up to a full one, then going around boasting about my fake four-leaf clover, knowing in my heart it could only bring bad luck. My mother in a Dolce & Gabbana swimsuit at the hot sulphur pools in Fontpédrouse, and the snow on the mountains behind her. The colour and shape of the fallen maple leaves in Phoenix Park, walking around on my own after taking oxycodone. Ice-creams in the corner shop like little pink feet. The girl from the school next door who used to hang out in the bushes where we went to smoke. She had cigarette burns all down her cleavage. She said she let her boyfriends do it and seemed to find it funny. Watching a video of a bullfighter being gored to death and the camera panning...

Ana Kinsella | Tolka, Issue One, Feb 2023 Entry My first home in London is a houseshare with five Icelandic artists. The flat is a maisonette with a small garden on a Shoreditch housing estate, and the garden is neglected, with a fringe of bamboo taller than any of us. I find it through a friend of a friend and take the room without viewing it. These facts are enough to make me feel legitimate and deft at being in the city, despite my newness. I’m a natural. It is not my first time living away from home, but it is the first time that it feels meaningful, a page turned rather than merely interrupted. I have a job, sort of, and a course of study, and people to have dinner with at the wide pine table whose grooves and knots I can still feel under my fingers. The East...

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...

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...