Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

     ‘Leave me!’ cried Blanco White. ‘I have fifteen miles to vamp across the lea.’

     ‘Fifteen? Are you sure?’

     ‘As sure as I am of the amusement that may be obtained from a leather sucker.’

     Meanwhile in his prison cell Renouard wondered if the moon’s small gravitational effect on earth had an unbalancing effect on pathogens, making the body more toxic. That would certainly explain Joshua’s peculiar behaviour.

     Back at the newspaper office the editor was approving the headline PHYSICIST SLAIN IN PRESS OFFICE SHOOTING. Then he finished his whisky and went home to his wife Julia. She was twenty-seven years old. Her favourite sentence in the novels of Jane Austen was A Hartfield edition of Shakespeare would have a long note on that passage. Julia was one of the very few people born in Lagos to know that George A. Birmingham was the pseudonym of James Owen Hannay.

     As she ate her hot bamboo that moonlit night Julia could never have imagined the strange sequence of events which would soon cause her to require the introduction of a rectal tube and bougie up her anus, let alone intubation of the larynx with O’Dwyer’s apparatus.

     After coffee she slipped upstairs and took a handkerchief-sized piece of leather from the water-filled bucket beneath he desk and made a hole in it using a wire nail. Taking a short piece of string she made a loop at each end. An expert at this, she well knew that there are limits to the size of a sucker that can be manipulated satisfactorily. As she cut the leather into the shape of a disc her thoughts turned to the Japanese physicist Yukawa, to the French scientist Louis de Broglie, and to Spilka’s theory that the grotesque is conditioned by oedipal arrest.