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

Alice is shod in cold.
Round each aisle,
her feet on the floorshine
are whispers from a slack mouth.

Sometimes they catch a steel pallet.
Then her body is more pain
than a gas ring, live and forgotten,
exhales on an unregarded hand.

Fresh carrots are best.
Her scraper, though, is dull
and slides as it pleases.
Hence her left palm
deep in her pocket, cross-hatched
in old purples.  It throbs,
a terrier beat at her heart.

Tins mean the opener.
Packets, the scissors.
Between her and food
these always lie, eyeing her frailty,
her ragged moves -

curled in her fingers,
they wait on her distraction
or simple blankness:
they slip, dig-twist,
murdering her in bits.

Somewhere is sliced meat,
cured for the connoisseur,
variety salads.  She saw them
laid out on blinding trays
in all that furious plenitude -
near some junction
where the hale folk were stretching,
lobbing armloads of fancy
into trim carts:

like casting bread
on your own private
backflowing waters.

Thinking, she retraces
or gets more lost, she doesn’t know:
three days’ meat salad,
and she’ll have eaten
all her lights and sockets for a week;
one salad will spare three lights
and the kettle;  two means the kettle only
and her coat on
and that blanket-was-curtain
with the hookholes biting her chin.

But an aisle’s end opens
on the driver from ‘Ring and Ride’:
poker-back, exploding hair.
He throws his weight on his right leg.
The weekly pose. The watch
shot from under the cuff.

At her elbow, a rack of Phineas Foggs:
corn and tortilla, a taste
that shrieks of New York. 
Family packs.  Comfort there,
some kind of warmth in the words
for her ghostly roomful.
She gingers one free

and minutes later
draws attention to the phrase,
as if expecting the Express girl
to gaze up and marvel
at a ring of sleek generations around her:

the girl sniffs,
begs pardon of her keypad,
asks if Alice has cards, desires cash,
knows of some prize involving Old Castile.

Alice freezes.
The driver works two coins from her hand.

Behind,
a princess in leathers
prepares a cheque,
fans out four cards,
unsprings a compact and sighs,
staring at that unbustable flush.