Matt Kendrick
Writer | Editor | Teacher
WELKIN PRIZE 2024 - SHORTLISTED
Stellate
by Michelle Walshe
A black star has:
An area of architectural distortion like a building with a misaligned block.
Central radiolucency like a real diamond held up to the light to discern it from a fake.
Long, thin, radiating spicules like those on a sea urchin twirling through the ocean.
Absence of a palpable lesion and macrocalcifications meaning it appears smooth.
A black star can:
Be a hiding place where danger secretes itself.
Mask a malign presence.
Attract alien bodies.
A black star is:
Invisible in the sky but visible on the x-ray.
Spiculating while I speculate – malignant or benign, malignant or benign?
Michelle Walshe is a writer from Dublin, Ireland. Her work has been broadcast on radio and published in literary journals, anthologies, newspapers, and magazines. She has been awarded residencies in Ireland at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Tin Jug Studio and Greywood Arts. In 2020, she won the Iceland Writers Retreat Alumni Award. In 2021, she was the recipient of an Emerging Artist award from Dun Laoghaire County Council and her work has received funding from Creative Ireland and the Arts Council of Ireland. She is writing her first novel which was highly commended in the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair 2022. In the same year she was awarded the Leopardi Writing Conference’s Jeannine Cooney scholarship for excellence in fiction. In Dublin, she volunteers for Roddy Doyle’s Fighting Words and the International Literature and Dalkey Book festivals. Her published work is on her website www.thesparklyshell.com
