Embedded Files
Winter
What it does to them when you walk in
like a ghost / generous and bored
pitched at a steep enough angle
: ricochet of crystallograms, the ego light
from icons to squeegeed glass
enough to bake all Ingham’s chicken.
It’s a gas, or, flash – so, nothing happens.
In words. Its virus whizz, through the pockets
in their acquisitiveness, stripping
their attachments penniless,
plugging a stake in the recess where
the maudlin’s heart was first bricolaged.
Make a petty monk of righteousness
: where the cultures sting, at least it is salt.
That’s what a ghost’s ennui supplies.
Quick pickpocketing the wit does
when it runs, like this, as it slaps
your shoulder, swindling between
property laughter.
The golden pews in a Metaphysical’s.
Head: he literally wants to soar above yours
on a plane
without seasons.
But, the puckered grain of a cheek in words
: the speed of your nudge.
So, our gratitude again
to Winter, which is never a negative,
an absence of colour.
A warm core, of unencumbered
crisp, fact
: smoke from a lip
pylons of a wood
ribs of a country
violent silhouetting.
Invincibility
that never asked to be loved, loved.
Elsewhere,
it’s autobiography’s fencing for steals
of leaves of gold –
a blunt thud on your rousing, this dawn.
We’re laughing. Disarming.
Melbourne’s corners
cornering, through you
the quick of restlessness.
No edifices of nouns to stop us now
: here, it is here; gone, it is gone.
No middle.
No ifs.
Born in the UK, raised in Australia, writer, translator, and scholar Corey Wakeling has lived in Japan since 2015. He is the author of four collections, the most recent being Uncle of Cats (Cordite Books, 2025). A fifth collection, Endless Fields: Ploughing for Clothes is forthcoming with Shearsman in late 2026. He is an associate professor of English at Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo.
Corey received a PhD in English from the University of Melbourne, and is the author of monograph Beckett’s Laboratory (Bloomsbury, 2021), co-edited anthology Outcrop (Black Rider Press, 2013), and has written numerous essays on modern and contemporary literature and performance. His translations of contemporary Japanese writers have featured in leading journals such as Fence, Asymptote, Second Factory, and Another Chicago Magazine, galleries such as Mori Gallery (Tokyo) and a83 (Manhattan), and theatres such as the Honda Theatre (Shimokitazawa).
Copyright © 2026 by Corey Wakeling, 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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