Caroline Smith
Scylla
Sucking great draughts of air
through her teeth,
Scylla heaves the colossus
of her heavy body
around the homestead
in which she was born.
At night she falls asleep
in the big high bed
that was her parents’
under the white damask cover.
The dry rasping sounds
from her open mouth
disturb the heads.
They rear out of her sleep:
David, Gilbert, Reuben, Philip, Bartlett, Stan,
the heads of her six
tormenting brothers.
Philip is still begging Reuben
to lend him his bike
just once before he goes to war.
She trawls the silent rooms for food
with which to nurse them.
Hunched over, fingers drawing like pond skaters
over greasy water congealed in pans,
she fishes out chicken limbs.
Her lips gurgle and smack round them
like wet sails flacking bulbously in the wind.
She gorges and swallows the unresolved wrongs,
the bitter fragments that fate has left behind,
the crackling of Reuben’s foot
through the spokes
when the telegram came.
Left behind among their jackets
stiffened by time,
the only daughter among six sons;
it had been her duty to shoulder the family
until it was too late
to ever leave her childhood home.
Page(s) 41-42
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