History Teacher
At the sauna you can walk round nude
but there’s cubicles for you
to plump up your dick a bit
before being so uninhibited.
I go once a week but Andy won’t
come with me. Says it’s full of gays
just there to see the flesh. Thinks
every scratch of an itch, or twitch
of a muscle is some kind of coded come-on.
I think that he’s wary because when
we were at school a teacher got thrown out
after they found he forced boys to have showers
so he could look at them naked.
Two years after he’d been sacked I saw him
in a crowded street in Manchester.
Pale and sad, clutching a book,
with shoppers surging round him, he looked
like a dead crab washed up among bathers
on a summer beach. Once he’d caught
me and J0 shagging on the pool table
and hadn’t said a word, not one.
Just walked away like a gentleman.
It did for the table though:
after that the balls would mass together
in one corner, like globs of mercury.
I should have stopped and talked to him,
I owed him. I don’t know why I didn’t.
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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