Heather Spears
A Witty Sexy Poem About an Iceberg
“He wants witty sexy poems about icebergs
to read to his cruise passengers now and then.”
But it has no sex and no wit. It tips
over, sometimes, weightily, or rights itself. The surface of the sea
meanwhile engages our visual cells, the ones
devoted to the horizontal, where they meet with delight
that outrageous barrier, that flagged vertical whose downward slice
is deep as a knife into cake. Wedding cake will do,
there’s the sex bit, tier over tier and mostly
hid from us, out on the deck and peering. The water’s strewn
with whites opaque as rags or as the sky. Between these a polish, a
dark translucence.
What parts of this scape can you penetrate, what can you see?
Whites beyond whites, green that has never been near grass, the green
of a beetle or a feather, maybe, in some remote location, the green of
phosphor and vermillion,
or some fake colour - a chemical
slid into candy that makes the teeth seethe.
Or some electric game, or the irid
of a reptile, or the very heart
of heat at the flame’s exhalation,
oxygens doing something weird and barely planetary.
Page(s) 250
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