Philip Byrne

REFLECTIONS ON A NUDIST BEACH

This is a sunny, enlightened time. The surf’s a song. The sun singes.
Childhood skin burns now precancerous, best to biopsy. I’d interrogate
my weight & wobble, but my knees & hips have betrayed me.

A fanny pack of prescription drugs & happy hour cocktails of multivitamins,
probiotics, & gummies to relax is all the rage. I use to be skinny but added
a stone’s heft with each baby’s birth. My man boobs are no longer penny-flat,

but Botox tightens baggy sags. A hat covers a tonsure; chin wattle’s
bearded. To camouflage is human. Flomax helps pee, Melatonin sleep.
I’m forgetting something, pre-dementia. The roto-rooter to stent arteries

opens questions of mortality & the blues. To reach an age in life & shrink,
is unfair. & if not virile, there’s pills for erectile tomfoolery. I’m talking about
that other guy, the Alpha hunk of masculinity, the naked porcine ass

peacocking on the beach while I, a walking miracle of medical science,
flaunt my whitening-striped teeth, most of the time wearing pants.

FISH ON FRIDAY

To be from an island where, once, eating meat on Fridays
was a transgression and to not eat fish was downright willful:

Every Friday, on the way home after the usual blood tests
in Temple Street Hospital, Ma would ask, Would you not try

a bit of fish, Pet? Daddy bought some lovely fresh cod
off the boat in Howth. She’d try hook me with a sweet treat bribe.

As the stinky fish fried on the pan, I gagged as if a scale bone
was still caught in my throat.

Philip Byrne was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland. He lives in Westchester, New York. He has been the poetry editor of Inkwell Magazine out of Manhattanville University. Recent poems are in The Beach Chair Press, The Raven Review, The Argyle, The Soliloquist, The Westchester Review, The Orchards Poetry Journal, and Anthropocene. While love and loss are themes, his writing captures snippets of sustenance and joy in language.