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

I’m mythologically pure.

Can you imagine? Long blonde hair combed for modesty, trailing speculation way down beyond my hips. And a face familiar with mirrors. Wide blue eyes, straight nose and plumptious dulse-red lips.

I’m a virgin.

Can you believe it - this side of a sailor’s saltfish dream that nets me, spliced? Ship’s whistle clean. Gasping for portside rations, however scrap-scanty and mean.

What else could I do?

But keen to the cliffs that cragged me in. Cradled me bladder-wrack, blood-black and blue like the muscle-shells clinging through high tide and hope to the rock where I scraped up, too. Took me all morning under a baking fairweather promise. On the apex, flaking fast, I blubbered my barnacled mouth out, full throttle red and screamed until my cracked lips bled,

“I know I have legs!”

God knows I still try to part them, knee jerks blistering my smooth shimmy finish. Late at night, trawled up now in this specimen tank, I watch the ripples through my chainmail scales, shocking and slapping the fantail fin like it could split, cave open. Give in. To the glassy fisheyes mooning in, I’ve lost count of the times I’ve blown a shape that said:

“I’m not your figurehead!”

I wake these days, tentacled in seed pearls rimming my rose-quartz breasts - pert as any land girl’s - then snaking down the same unyielding scene. The impenetrable, mother-of-perfection sheen. Non-performing. Sealed.

Yet I terrify of love, the knife. The passion that will rip me with a surgeon’s zeal, lap me then leave my aquamarine to seep into scum-bubble tide. Tailed and filleted bride. Prized apart, myself from myself - an experiment, failed and filed on the shelf, nursing a split too deep to feel until beached and landed, I move with a gliding, slip-shifting, agonising lilt

you might consider real.