‘Making the Air Visible’

Mark O’Flynn

(First published in Rochford Street Review, July 2025)

- Rosalie Gascoyne

, she said

the instinct of evaporating water

a feather’s murmuring

the heat of food in the bowel

wood constrained by paint

hills freed by order

bones by varnish when the flesh has gone

dusk infected by recalcitrant dawn

paradox creeping into the lungs

like pollen into the oxygen tent

ruined crops marching over

the paddock towards us

the pattern

of a river’s ripples,

before the landscape of the sky

puts us in our place.