Emma Lee
From Leicester to Planet X
A sudden stop at Chesterfield
wheels on rails screech feedback:
a sound technician’s signal failed
amongst angered guitars,
must make Liverpool by 20:30.
Time warps like a retro band,
who think the seventies are really now:
two hours feels like four.
A slow silence murmurs
- strings sampled out of context -
builds a buzzing crescendo of irritation.
Headliners start at ten.
It’s now eight and with no rehearsal
the train jerks into the motion
of a bassist a bar behind the drummer.
A station screen flickers to cancellation
with the pulsed insistency of a strobe.
Solid as a bouncer, the stationmaster tells me
I’m stranded at Sheffield Pond Street.
Rain beats onto the platform:
I resent the way it sounds
like stamped demands for an encore
to a stage empty but for a drained glass
and an abandoned plectrum.
Page(s) 52
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