“Make Peace, Make Peace”

Poems by Will Wells and Brooke Clark

Order the Winter 2026 issue of Nimrod International Journal or subscribe today.

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As I’ve mentioned before, among the thrills of editing a journal is the discovery of resonances between two pieces submitted during the same window by authors working miles, sometimes even oceans apart. Our latest issue carries two such pieces—poems by Will Wells and Brooke Clark that treat, with light, sensitive hands but clear eyes, the moment of summing up, when we take account of what we will leave behind us, and, if we are lucky, accept it for what it is and what it isn’t.

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Real Estate

Fanned out from first to last across his sickbed, 
they rested—photographs of houses where 
he’d lived, like footprints on a lonely strand

ending at water’s edge. Victorian
to modern homes, seemingly vacant, folks
gone separate ways to somewhere else… Fargo

or Topeka neatly printed on the rear 
to conjure some completeness they’d contained,
however fleeting. Frequent handling

had varnished each snapshot, as if to erase
mistakes, thicker with each move, a progress
that resembled regress, even regret.

And that was it. He sighed and died, leaving
a meager bequest of vacated rooms
for strangers to fill with what remains

of their captivating and captive lives.
Boxed belongings, stacked like marble rescued
from a demolition, await carting off.

                — Will Wells


On Where You Are

The years stack into dusty calendars:
accomplishments your younger selves aspired
to realize recede—not enough time
or energy, or whatever was required.
No sculpted masterworks to leave behind,
just visions never brought into effect,
abandoned drafts pen-scored, ink-splotched,
discarded fragments of the larger wreck.
From all of this, the ultimate release
comes soon enough. Make peace, make peace.

                — Brooke Clark

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Brooke Clark is the author of the poetry collection Urbanitiesand the editor of the online epigrams journal: The Asses of Parnassus. His work has appeared in Arion, THINK, Literary Imagination, After Dinner Conversation, The Walrus, the LA Review of Books, and other places.

Will Wells’s latest full-length poetry collections include Odd Lots, Scraps & Second-hand, Like New (Grayson Books, 2017) which won the 2016 Grayson Poetry Prize and Unsettled Accounts (Ohio Univ./Swallow Press, 2010) which won the Hollis Summers Prize. The two poems here are drawn from his latest manuscript, Enduring Damage, which is complete and seeking a publisher. He has poems forthcoming in Birmingham Poetry Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Belmont Story Review. His poems appear in current/recent issues of Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, Notre Dame Review, and Alabama Literary Review.

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Order the Winter 2026 issue of Nimrod International Journal or subscribe today.

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