Jim Burns
from: Proletarian Nights
And in the pub that Friday
I said to Eleanor, as the quintet
with a clarinet instead of a violin
played Thirties jazz,
that Glasgow was a proletarian city,
the likes of which
we’d never seen in England.
Eleanor spoke of other places,
but Glasgow and its graveyard
became my dream that night,
with its doctored cats,
its King Billy processions,
its poets locked out of libraries,
its tanks in the street in 1919,
its smash in the face
for no reason at all,
and the time I did a nosedive
over a stack of chairs
during a late-night drinking session
in a city-centre hotel.
The music was winding down behind us,
Eleanor breathed a sigh of relief
as the fat man made for the door,
then someone nudged me,
and all that was solid
dissolved into air.
Page(s) 36
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