Susan Darlington
Left-Lyric Office
Yesterday this wooden tongue sank,
bee stung and swollen.
It got dragged under the brook
where it now clicks, impotent
in a stitched up hole.
Alphabet whores and carpenters
float past in their ivory maze,
gorged on atrophied lingual grain.
They’re busy building a pyre
on Alveolar Ridge, piling up ovipositors,
fat black berries and Seroxat crystals
they scraped from the tongue’s tissue.
When lit up it glows purple, sends
plumes of smoke billowing down
to concertina’d desert folds,
creaking and groaning into action
with dissonant scales.
Here is the left-lyric office,
each dry tongue wrapped in brown
paper awaiting collection.
Here is the water-logged junction
that fissures in the heat,
releases saused orphans
into the laryngeal slip-stream
and maps out their way back home.
Page(s) 56
magazine list
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- Lamport Court
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- Pen Pusher Magazine
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- Poetry Salzburg Review
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- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
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- Shearsman
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- Staple
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- Thumbscrew
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