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

1

You were lying on top of me
waving your small hand.
I was concerned about
the foreign invasion,
the tiny animals
threatening to explode my ovaries.
You gave me a rubber palate,
you said it was an interheart device
that would prevent this sort of thing
from happening. Maybe I was
reassured. I reached to touch the hole
in your buttocks and was
sucked in.

2

The street lights
are stretching like amoebae
they are trying to reach in
and read my palm
they are discussing my future
humming their voices
like refrigerators
I should get up and confirm them
but sleep more comfortable
I go on
listening to my diagnosis

3

I hear the splintering of stairs.
I hear the beads that
covered the door
where you used to live.
You with your huge breasts
and infallible IUD.
You used to say
how beautiful I was
and tell the men in the bars
that we were lovers.
We spent hours together
cutting the people we knew
up in pieces and putting them
back together as poems.
Why are you walking
around here tonight?
I know that you are in
Amsterdam. Why are you rattling
those beads?
You lived only in that house
a short while
before the child died.
You have only to get up again
and leave us all behind.

4

This situation can only be analyzed
mathmatically. Just 100 feet from
the monster’s eye my finger rests
on the pillow. I have one minute to get
away. My mother and father are
already breathing the poison. My friends
from high school are trying on
new dresses. My brother is eating
his fingernails. A boat will touch
the tip of the island just in time.
There will be a yard between
the wharf and the dock of the boat.
I will have to wake up and jump.