Embedded Files
Things you no longer see
After ‘Photie Man’, Tom Woods
Jukebox tracklist (foxed paper). A man with a cigarette tucked behind his ear. In bird-winged cape, the selenium lights up his face.
A girl carries a Benson & Hedges tray through a hallway of backglancing fathers. What are you looking at?
A woman in red shoes, groceries either arm, right foot stepping into a pyre of fishguts.
Abruzzi shits the stoop. Alan in Gráinne, pensive as the bull’s hide he stands upon. Miss New Brighton bronzes a c-type bonnet. His tongue rolls upper gums at the Wig Centre foyer.
Furcoatsisters, Adam’s ants. The flashlit strop of the park. Dicky John’s ghettoblaster. Tailspin to bodypop. Two mop-haired toddlers sleep in a Silver Cross, refuse bags for pillows.
they that go down to the sea in ships and have their business in great waters.
A whole morning left to play Peppy the Clown.
paint. artex. Kirkby’s uncladded risers smeared through tag glass. spliffo. cso96.
seacombe paula so
fairy is is
boy a whore plonky
Trigger hand on the till. Unseen apertures of the gyratory. Dockers with arms folded at the Laird shipyard. This is your union.
Beach matt bamboo green-frilled at the Halio snack bar. Thatcher’s tomb crates. Grandmother’s hands bound in gauze mittens.
chee’s burge. jumbo saus. Burgermouth stacks grin from the grills.
Over the reclining chair, a nurse administers the medication by pinching the patient’s eyes open.
Fluke’s Kingdom. A man in polished heels considered his exit.
Lovers Beach
Plant a foot from the rickety boat
and wish for luck. A totem of rock
points to invisible stars, and the wind
grins, lifts an umbrella from the soft
stake you made in the ground.
To enter into this requires a little
burning of the skin. A man alone
in the water, his lover lounging
beside a tower of mango, sighing
to the sun. Just a little burning of the skin.
By dusk, the totem’s shadow smothers
its tide. Hieroglyphs of heron’s lime
and blood. When the last boat arrives,
you wade in, leap over the waves.
Divorce Beach
NO PADDLING. You can’t just
dip your feet in. Many people
die here. Even to reach the shore,
you might as well be breathalised
or take a hit from a ventilator.
Riptidally, your future awaits.
People have died here. Others
scroll back through their Whatsapp—
last seens of the ex/ex-to-be. Are you
still awake? Is it much too late now?
Cracked molar of rock. No-one else
here but you and the breaker’s fume.
A solitary red flag declares: BEYOND
THIS POINT, EVERYTHING IS RISK
James Byrne is a poet, editor, translator and visual artist. His most recent poetry collection is The Overmind (2024, Broken Sleep Books). Others include Places you Leave (Arc Publications, 2022) and Of Breaking Glass (BSB, 2022). A Selected Poems, Nightsongs for Gaia, is due in 2025. Byrne was the editor of The Wolf, an influential, internationally-minded literary magazine between 2002 and 2017. In 2012, he co-translated and co-edited Bones Will Crow, the first anthology of contemporary Burmese poetry to be published in English (Arc, 2012) and I am a Rohingya, the first book of Rohingya refugee poems in English. Byrne is the International Editor for Arc Publications and co-editor of Atlantic Drift: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics (Edge Hill University Press/Arc, 2017). His co-translation with the author Ro Mehrooz of Rohingya poems, Poems Written Through Barbed-Wire Fences, was published by Arc in October 2024.
Copyright © 2025 by James Byrne, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
Report abuse