White
As if all the convolvulus she’d seen
on a stretch of wasteground
trumpeting their purity to the sun
had risen en masse after dusk,
moths crammed the grainy
gold beams thrown by passing cars,
their flutter exciting as that first touch
long ago in a party crush,
vulnerable as her body peeled of clothes.
After the thin wings vanished into night
why did she keep thinking of
a hot stream from udders into a pail,
the terrible spill the day she was nine
and fell over an iron lid
jutting from the brown dirt pavement,
the unbroken bottle she hugged
to her chest as she limped home,
blood pouring from knee and palm,
the doctor’s invasion with tweezers,
the white skin that grew at last
over the pieces of grit trapped inside her?
Page(s) 33
magazine list
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- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
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- French Literary Review, The
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- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
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- Lamport Court
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- Magma
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- Matter
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- Monkey Kettle
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- North, The
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- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
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- Poetry London (1951)
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- Poetry Salzburg Review
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- Private Tutor
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- Quarto
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- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
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- Shearsman
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- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
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- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The