Foreign exchange
Night-time. House music. Beatings.
Waiters laying tables to feed the righteous millions.
Guns under the tables speak for themselves,
and to the barmen with daggers in their eyes I say,
I can drink no more. I climb the stairs to the outside
and sing the praises of Elena, my daughter's age,
until time for bed at the end of this particular world.
Nails dipped in nitroglycerine, she's younger
than she says, older than she thinks, colder
than a tramline and thinner than a border –
a beautiful ill-mannered accident of a border –
teasing herself from the Jugendstil to push
her plastic and silicon against me like the press
of mist on the Hapsburg city straight from Kafka's
consumptive nightmare of velvet revolutionaries
and the fairytale castle an open asylum...
Fluent in four currencies and two languages –
one alive and one dead - she directs our taxi-driver
through the soundtrack of tyres stuttering on the rain
and flags of fifties' streets, to her sparse apartment
of many windows; to her body on a square bed,
every orifice dark as a pin and pierced in order
of importance from the happily inconsequential
to the awkward in the extreme.
Waiters laying tables to feed the righteous millions.
Guns under the tables speak for themselves,
and to the barmen with daggers in their eyes I say,
I can drink no more. I climb the stairs to the outside
and sing the praises of Elena, my daughter's age,
until time for bed at the end of this particular world.
Nails dipped in nitroglycerine, she's younger
than she says, older than she thinks, colder
than a tramline and thinner than a border –
a beautiful ill-mannered accident of a border –
teasing herself from the Jugendstil to push
her plastic and silicon against me like the press
of mist on the Hapsburg city straight from Kafka's
consumptive nightmare of velvet revolutionaries
and the fairytale castle an open asylum...
Fluent in four currencies and two languages –
one alive and one dead - she directs our taxi-driver
through the soundtrack of tyres stuttering on the rain
and flags of fifties' streets, to her sparse apartment
of many windows; to her body on a square bed,
every orifice dark as a pin and pierced in order
of importance from the happily inconsequential
to the awkward in the extreme.
Page(s) 60-61
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The