Losing an Allergy
we gathered the almonds of that winter
but, believing myself intolerant,
come February I'd tasted none.
every adobe ruin but the church
(where a mandarin lay at the root of the tree
pipped and dry inside its baggy peel)
had fig leaves spread across its walls,
a threshold but no door, was bound
to a grove by the mustard road
on whose damp beds of litter
& spent cartridges their shells lay
clean as bone. all damn winter,
I split them lengthwise
with our oldest tool then into good & bad
fed you their hard milk
before the night you put one
on my tongue and briefly unafraid, I held
for the reaction I'm still due
Patrick Romero McCafferty's poetry has appeared recently in Granta, Wasafiri, & the Irish Pages. 'An August Work Party', an album with the band Anoraq, came out in May 2026. He edits Wet Grain, a magazine for land poetry. Patrick's pamphlet, Glass Knot Sun, was published by ignitionpress in 2025.
Our transactional relationship with nature – and all the things we want from it, from food cultivation to escapism – forms a subtle undercurrent to this Scottish-Mexican poet's debut pamphlet. There's an Emersonian sense of the natural world is a place of refuge (in poems such as 'Building Your Hut in the Woods'), as well as a clear-eyed acknowledgment that our attempts to bend it to our will tend to gang aft agley (a fact realised, far too late, by the speaker of the witty 'The Second Tea Farm in Scotland'). Written in a clear style, but with an appealing understatement and sense of mystery, these poems left us hungry for more.
