Three Poems by Max Wallis

Illustration of various flowers arranged in a circle around a sun, showing different blooming stages with numbered arrows pointing to each flower

1833 print depicting Carl Linnaeus’ “flower clock”, a horological device that tracks the day’s hours based on the circadian rhythms of flowers that exhibit “nastic” movement — the “opening” and “closing” of petals and leaves in response to light — Source.

Terms of Growth

If you’re looking for God, turn to soil. It remembers teeth, tin, even the sins— ossiferous holdings of leechers and rot. I did not kill anyone. But mud beckons bleachers and roots, lets us grow even through little hope, and certainly no grace. Just function: time and pressure, all of it. You yearn for versions that are clean— seed, light, bloom. But nothing here begins without damage. White flowers warn from boughs no one reads. Stick a finger knuckle-deep in me and what comes out is bacteria, ague. No stationery. No pen. Just cilia and all my last meals. The soil god keeps record. Forgive yourself— you have already entered its contract.

Your Bog Body

Hawthorn Unmasked

So, shall I unmask you, Hawthorn? You, who braceletted me with thorns. You are Crataegus of the family Rosaceae. Few know your other names: Oath-Taker, Seen Too Late, you, the booby-trap boor, canalside bloom-mask, blood-letter and bone-splice trap. You who lace the path with a barbed snare, white-flowered succour a lure, thorn-deep bite for the runner who does not stop in time. Who cannot stop for fear of what happens if he is to fall into water. Prick-tattoo, flesh-tether, blood-bound knot-of-berries— even I didn’t know your scent until it was too late. Volatile trickster, molecular blueprint, triethylamine-thick, fish-stink, spit-slick, fuck-scented, marrow-ripe, a pre-rot hush. Blood-oaths pool in your soil, jab-and-syringe, gorse-bitten nails. Birds chitter in the maw of your splintered mass, spines brittle, haystack-pinned. Paralysed by web. Few know what seeps from you. The deathscent you produce: thick with caution, air-clotted, body-borne kept from closed rooms on May Day, around family, lest the smell turns thick with warning. Be wary of Hawthorn. It is Rosaceae. Oath-Taker. Thorn-Snare and Blood-Keeper. Fish-Rot and Bindweed. It is Tether. It is Death. It is Seen Too Late.
A person with glasses and ruffled shirt stands near a billboard that reads 'After trauma, there is still poetry. The Aftershock Review is here'
Max Wallis in front of a bilboard advertising the journal, The Aftershock Review

Max Wallis is an award-winning poet whose book Modern Love was shortlisted for the Polari Prize. His poems appear in Vogue, The Rialto, and The Spectator. He came third in the Michael Marks Environmental Poet of the Year Award and was commended in the Magma Editors’ Prize. He edits The Aftershock Review. His latest book is published by Verve: Well Done, You Didn’t Die.