2979-2762 The Hythe Review 2979-2762 Open Library of Humanities 10.16995/thr.29427 Poetry Excerpt from Bark, Archive, Splinter Gao Jay jaygying@gmail.com 1 English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University 25 06 2026 2026 1 1 1 6 Copyright: © 2026 The Author(s) 2026 This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

An excerpt from Jay Gao’s Bark, Archive, Splinter.

 Bark, Archive, Splinter Bark, Archive, Splinter Mutt of pine. Must each orange tick be painted and clear progress ────────────────────accumulation Wherever the cloud-shepherd earth gives way for breeding ash, notanda, vellum,         drafting mistletoe, black sunlight, clearances, hidden life, marking corrupt         pastoral, vestigial colonies, and fog over glare over thistle over broom over brassica         over timbre over errata over kingdoms over. For the record Missing witness trees as mass media You select the same sequence of strange encounters over. A uniform lyric expression Even up there, remaindered in the almanac of what is said to be untranslatable, liquid         speech egresses Ambient river of phantom canopies: leftover body of work ────────────────────────────holes Diasporic hunger to metabolise all this minted nature So you pinch these lines and databases from a world rewilded. Promise to recoup spent wonder Mustering diction in the interest of the non-human To roster a higher rank of wilted sleep. Refuse to register the excess of your rounded mutter ──────────────────────────────ledger Bark, Archive, Splinter Bark, archive, splinter Following pandemics of ink disease and voyages in reverse, can wordhoard be both         measure and buffer Inline with fluctuating numbers along critical food chains Your remit is to forge the full stress of globally lavish adjectives To get close to the subject. His subject Trespassing past headstones towards the willow, the thorn, the poplar, the plane, the         oak, the maple, the linden, the laurel, the holm, the hazel, the fir, the elm, the         dogwood, the chestnut, the box, the birch, the beech, the aspen, the ash, the alder,         and the Absent addressee. Assembling a defence for the organic in the shade of poisonous yews The second person must be plural. Fingering its arils, you discover yew trees inhibit the         viable decoding of these groves ────────────────────────────         ──────────────graves After persistent amassment, after magnifying broadcasts, those underground         thresholds may have turned toxic You are searching for your single artefact The conversion. To be handled with gloves, to protect against splintering, to         communicate. With others The eye is sometimes borrowed sometimes Someone else’s pain Bark, Archive, Splinter Bark, archive, splinter As an order. Not a note Say your face was bleeding, or that you were always right behind him Say you were tenderriven out of your limits, or that you lay outwith the reach of         his orchardside ──────────────────────────────────         ──oversight Say ten hundred infantry vanish in the cover. Of an underpass, or that the dule trees         ahead of the barracks, not knowing what they are yet, not knowing that they are         dead yet, they wait to wail, they weep to waste sap, to reverb and recycle lonely         parts of speech. Yes Wake up! Firs, even in the company of fruiting trees, do they know why they lack the         flesh that makes ancient grammar friable A bed of moss in each foreign territory. Carapace of thrashing tormentil No sir Sorry sir Biography

Jay Gao is a poet from Edinburgh, Scotland, living in New York City. His second poetry collection The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber is forthcoming in Fall 2026 from Nightboat Books and Carcanet Press. His debut collection Imperium (Carcanet, 2022) was a winner of the 2023 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, an Eric Gregory Award and a Somerset Maugham Award. Currently, he is a PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

 Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.