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

She resurrects the day with her beads
And smoke. The mantelpiece silence
Of the china dogs, they guard the Blessed Virgin
In her pawnticket shrine. She washes them
So much they grow pale and sightless,
Their tartan scarves faded as cold, soft ash.
Coals shift. She curses Cromwell
As though it were yesterday. I watch
The bitter set of her back. Sour, black apron.
Her fierce wirewool love scours my soul
Pure as the cream fleece of my liberty bodice.
I am reared on brown wood and flames,
I will grow into a corner boy with Brylcreemed edges
Glued to walls with spittle.

The wireless plays a plump, tea-cosy song:
I’ll take you home again, Kathleen,
Across the waters wide and wild.
A herring moon is pulled across the sky.
Her only passion is slipped
Under kitchen cushions;
Maltese vice-kings rule her empire
Of melting brass, and
Tongs with empty charcoal hands;
The little hellfires that never go out.
News of the World covers the fresh scrubbed floor,
Amami wave sets permanent as iron
Smile their cultured pearl smile.
We are perfect, they say,
We will curl forever. Mother of eight
Said she was twenty one. She is a new woman
Since taking Bile Beans Laxative.

I slip off the edge of the world
Into octopus deep pools of scoutmasters,
Smiling, crumpled bags of headless
Jelly Babies, chocolate covered sin;
The yellowed, curling summer of the typist
Cycling home from the cinema.
Lucifer is everywhere,
Wearing his belted gabardine mac,
He speaks with an English accent.
The earth is smelling of Sunlight soap,
Worlds collide to the clink of a tea-cup.
For the first and last time I lie
In the curve of her hollowed shape,
Listening to the gleam of red coals.