Embedded Files
from AFTERWORDS
pomegranate apricot
trading post a starting
-point bronze forged
bartering word shells
markets define a pagan
glebe the grain renamed
frontiers guarding
millennial distances
to chivalric romance
dumbshows plague
-driven dialects
supplanted counter
displays enticing
strangers ancestor
laryngeals vanished
from the steppe
mother tongue footing
gated trade-offs
unmissed street-level
seaborne migrations
inflatable to flotsam
tracing back beached
steps speechless
ice age for afterworld
into the grasslands
a 1906 expedition
displaced the equine
by word of mouth
Odin peripheral runes
dissever urban oases
with a few pots
dead reckoning
a thousand
-year diaspora planted
remains knees raised
artless to strangers
clay tablets co
-ordinate signal and thicket
border infringements
scattered in sacrifice
when languages
roamed wilderness
from suffix to remix
Stone Age nomads
traded the immaterial
in retreat before
settlers flint-carved
characters deciphered
behind lit windows
a prayer-fuelled endurance
echoing an elsewheres’
ancestral mist
ovum avis
never no
origin home
base in
folk speech
at cost
of change
text connects
word music
digitized birdsong
on-line pitch
rhythmic rip-offs
puffed up
class market
for transient
mass tone
literally glossemic
scrambled image
chains fluid
to frost-feathered
upper limit
dreaming tree-lined
progress erratic
descendants hard-wire
dispersed roots
syntactically blocked
words building
futures in
your mouth
frozen out
subject to target
spoken in patois
self-rendering image
raised in the dust
identity threatens flags
map flat bread
ambushed in olive groves
a turbulent expansion
fled with their possessions
tent city aftertaste
over heated stones
enlisting a lost tongue
to be ambushed in brambles
4,000 years later
like a ghost at dawn
on the social margins
transients declining
under the radar
its reality principle
breaching borders
grammar repatriates
a discursive absence
Adrian Clarke had a long association with Bob Cobbing and Writers Forum. He is now a member of the Veer Books editorial collective. Recent publications include Austerity Measures (Contraband, 2018) and Euromancer (KFS, 2021).
Copyright © 2026 by Adrian Clarke, 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.
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