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      After the Storm With the completion of mindset my life is in order, two weeks after the day before. Anyone can aspire to cultural intelligence, feast on the corpse of public discourse but I've got the music to go with it. Despite feverish hype and...

      Venn diagram featuring working-class wages and lemons Those times my tongue becomes a lemon filling my mouth with bitter pith stoppering sound so it coagulates in my throat, becomes a stuck fruit; I must breathe through my nose in short, calm...

      Wah-Wah Pedal Poem I hide a knife amongst a bush longing to burn, days like these are plots from a heathen's bible. Broken glass, making noise on the skeleton-throne night becomes heartless stone, guilty as mathematics bleeding poetry from the...

      My Previous Life as a Swallow My second cousin twice removed arrived in May at her old nest in the eaves of the ruined barn. I see her and her partner flying in and out on the crest of breezes we used to surf together, joining dusk aerobatics at...

      Brigid’s Land Grab A white cloak that folds like a shopping bag, like a Pac-a-mac with pagan overtones, much larger when unfolded than a pocket, a TARDIS of a cloak. And when she threw it, opened it up, it kept unfurling, a flag for all the earth...

      Patience I grow shoots, acid green; climb the walls, surprise myself. I dream of the way I would fall, the axe’s half-diamond. In the greenhouse, light and water make me tall, and my tremulous leaves scrawl love-letters on the windowpane.  ...

      Jigsaw It starts in utero, painted wood carvings thick as a finger, gift wrapped in nostalgia. Colour weaves in time, a voice with a thousand faces. Some velcro themselves, urchins of experience. Some are stolen. Onlookers swapping their gray...

      Record Made a list. A record. The dishes she ate. Monuments visited. In Paris. In chronological order. A narrative into Paris, from England, through the dark tunnel, into the light. Then back, returning from steak and frites by the Arc de...

      Picnic Tempting death with every cobblestoned step his face was a collection of broken records — I was devouring a cheese baguette with grape jelly — Alas, my desires are always replaced by hunger / now we avoid each other at the King Streetcar —...

      Waste There’s more waste than we use for the things we ordinarily use waste for, such as piling it on barges and sending them out to sea, tucking it under the surface like a layer of insulation, diamonds were waste once, and diamonds are valuable,...

      Just in Case You'd Forgotten there are some lives lived poolside and others that mostly consist of a bent back in a field – some are chauffeured some are piled into the backs of trucks driven fifty miles from border to farm on rough roads – some...

      To the Litten Tree Morning sees droplets of spittle flicked over foraging insects. Down hind legs, hidden among the leaves, the sated dump fresh honeydew and trees weep sugar. Sweet hurt. Little graces matter. The bus drivers know us, let us smoke...

      Bats You are pleased to see me in my gothic T-shirt – those bats, you say, have been your friends. Throughout the months you think you’ve been here, they have perched above your bed, protectors, telling you by sonar, not to fear. Without them, you...

  Mark Wyatt now lives in the UK after teaching overseas. His work has recently appeared in Exterminating Angel, Greyhound Journal, Ink Sweat and Tears, Osmosis, Sontag Mag, Streetcake Magazine, and Talking About Strawberries All Of The Time. More here:...