Concertina by Mark Ward

Concertina
You don’t know how to be alone.
You don’t know how to be
alone. You don’t know how to
be alone. You don’t know how
to be alone. You don’t know
how to be alone. You don’t
know how to be alone. You
don’t know how to be alone.
You don’t know how to be alone.

Mark Ward is the author of the chapbooks Circumference (Finishing Line Press, 2018), Carcass (Seven Kitchens Press, 2020) and Hike (Bear Creek Press, 2021), as well as and a full-length collection, Nightlight (Salmon Poetry, 2022). His poems have been in The Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee, Boyne Berries, Skylight47, The Honest Ulsterman, Assaracus, Tincture, Cordite, Softblow and many more. He was Highly Commended in the 2019 Patrick Kavanagh Award. In 2020 he was shortlisted for the Cúirt New Writing Prize and selected for Poetry Ireland’s Introductions series and in 2021, he was awarded a bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland. He is the founding editor of Impossible Archetype, an international journal of LGBTQ+ poetry, now in its fifth year.

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