John Lindley
Caught Between Journals and Sylvia Plath
for Melanie
She is her own Lady Lazarus,
rising like poppies in October.
She has cruised through death's intervals
via a journal of half-truths
launched from a child's innocence.
She has tracked time's tendrils
as if their green meanderings
would one day halt and take root
in a sensory garden, snag to the earth
much as a coupling of bracelet and beard might snag.
But even in such a journal,
all paper and cord and blistering glue,
she does not travel alone -
she hauls people, five, dead and remembered,
on her journey,
pulling and gathering them together
as corded, bound firewood she'll never use.
She stores them in her heart's hearth
and sits by the grate,
choosing to burn flowers instead,
watching the boiling bulbs' hot grins -
hatchlings for saplings of smoke.
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