Mario Petrucci
from Thames
Obvious, isn’t it - the Thames
as a snake? Yet, it sloughed off terraces
as it side-wound southwards, left us
the odd cast of an out-grown loop.
Through the Pleistocene it twisted
deranged, as if struck by a poet’s block -
it unlocked jaws for the drowning
rats of its estuary. It sleeps now
in mid-digestion. Essex ploughs on,
puts down its asphalt slug-tracks.
A 747 passes low, blushed by sunset,
vulnerable as an upturned frog -
and now and then an old man turns
in his allotment a devil’s toenail
or into a nest of pebbles there pushes
a pale mammal pink - the real-time
of a child’s fingers, who kneels
and fearlessly steals one cold egg.
Havering Year-of-the-Artist, 2000
Page(s) 48
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