Duncan Curry
A Delightful Opportunity To Acquire
There are sycamores and a bowling green
but the end of the road is pot holes.
One hundred and twenty is squeezed between
the chip shop and a railway siding of coal.
The door is difficult over the phone book.
There’s a clock card for gas and electric,
a credit statement from Northampton underfoot
and a postcard to Alison from Nick.
The kitchen, ‘recently refitted’, is small
and the agent’s blurb forgets to mention
the bend of gas pipe to the opposite wall
and the stone floor split in two directions.
In the lounge the paper is in heavy bloom;
deep colours shrink the room to half size.
The electric fire has copper flue
flame effect and smoke which doesn’t rise.
The main bedroom is a month of jobs.
A cracked window takes the hill’s contour;
wires show from salmon pink plaster, a gob
of paint holds a five litre tin to the floor.
The garden path ends in a tangle
of blackberry bushes, grass fringes the roof.
The fall pipe leans back and an angle
of slate sticks out like a tooth.
I swing the keys as if I own the place,
go round again and take another look.
In the bathroom, a mirror waits for a face.
I check the back door, nick the phone book.
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