Letter from Guadalajara

Ben Rhys Palmer

The rainy season is packing its bags here in Guadalajara, and so am I. I’ll miss it. I’ll miss the sweet smell of damp earth steaming in the morning sun. I’ll miss the miniature jungle our garden has become, and the agreeable punctuality of the climate: storm clouds obediently waiting until evening to make their dramatic entrance, after a day of perfect blue.

What I won’t miss are the 2 a.m. thunderclaps that rattle the house and send Chico into fits of apocalyptic barking. I won’t miss venturing out the next morning, bleary-eyed from dog-and-thunder related sleep deprivation, to find yet another of the neighbourhood’s venerable trees toppled by the night’s storm. The storms have felt fiercer this year, a reminder that the seasons are starting to rewrite their own rules.

Chico is softly snoring at my feet, while in Chico’s bed, Don Pancho, the eldest of our adopted cats – the one I found loitering near a taco stand, bleeding from his head – lies in blissful abandon, legs akimbo, honey-hued belly displayed to the world like a furry piece of fruit.

Garden

From my desk I can see the garden that kept us afloat during the plague years: lemon, lime, mango, guayaba, fig, loquat. In this secret place, hidden from the world by improbably high walls, hummingbirds hover, grackles heckle, and squirrels stage reckless raids on the mangos while Chico defends his patch in vain.

The house is modest, blue-and-white, vaguely Mediterranean, a little ramshackle, but a haven for us and the animals we’ve taken in, each with their own oddities and neuroses from their time on the streets.

I’ll leave all this behind tomorrow to travel to Wales, where I was born, to launch my first poetry collection. In Breakfast with the Scavengers, the poems roam between Mexico, Wales, and the wilder corners of my imagination. There are Fish Gods who vanish into rivers, axolotls that smile through pollution, and tardigrades preparing to tough out another great extinction.

Elsewhere, a philosophizing hyena and a psychotherapist from outer space make an appearance. There’s also Eden, the robot gardener, preoccupied by chrysalids and caterpillars even as he undergoes his own quiet metamorphosis. They’re poems of curiosity, of things that survive awkwardly or against the odds.

It feels like a peculiar time to be bringing out my debut. The world seems less like it’s waiting for poetry and more like it’s bracing itself for the next storm. To launch a book of poems just now feels a little like performing card tricks on the deck of a listing ship. Still, perhaps that’s what poets are for.

What are writers for?

Such questions – what writers are for, what words can do – bring me to my day job, where I work as a declaration writer for an immigration law firm in the United States. There, words have a different kind of urgency; they are testimonies of abuse, pleas for safety, attempts at belonging. Every sentence a declaration writer drafts might help someone stay with their family, or it might be dismissed with a capricious change in policy. Our clients, mostly Mexican, live in constant fear, and the ground beneath them shifts daily.

By the time I return in late October, the rains should be gone, though even here the weather no longer feels quite so reliable. For now, I pack my suitcase along with the season, leaving behind an overgrown garden and a dog who still believes thunder can be barked into submission.

Ben Rhys Palmer’s debut collection Breakfast with the Scavengers is out 2 October 2025. Join Parthian Books for a joint book launch with Ben Rhys Palmer, Roberto Pastore and their editor Susie Wild at Cardiff Waterstones on Thursday 16 October 2025. 

Ben Rhys Palmer is a poet, translator, editor, and musician born in Cardiff, Wales and now based in Guadalajara, Mexico. His poetry has been published in The London Magazine; Poetry Wales; New Welsh Review; Forklift, Ohio, and Under the Radar. Winner of the Verve Poetry Competition 2022, Ben was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize 2023 and highly commended in the Winchester Poetry Prize, the Kent & Sussex Poetry Competition, The Interpreter’s House Poetry Competition and the Welshpool Poetry Festival Competition. Breakfast with the Scavengers is his debut collection.