John McCullough
My Bohemia
After Rimbaud
And so I left, fists sunk into the pockets
of a fleece stitched together by no more than that word.
Great Muses, I walked chalk paths as your willing slave
and ah! what salty dreams were my reward.
My only track suit bottoms had a hole
vast enough to let in Boreas but I didn’t
care, sowed rhyme with each step, my motel
The Bulldog, its stars a clutch of queens.
In thickets on cool September nights, I listened
with strangers to rain falling, seeping down
to underground streams or releasing the soil’s scents;
and there, hemmed in by bushes, I rhymed
aloud and strummed the laces of my battered pumps
like an acoustic, one foot below my heart.
John McCullough’s poetry has appeared in The Rialto, The Guardian, Smiths Knoll, Reactions and was a past Showcase in Magma. He is the author of Unplugged at Cafe Atlantic (Waterloo 2004) and Cloudfish (Pighog Press 2006). He lives in Brighton.
Page(s) 34
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