Robert Cole
Parisienne
On the peripherique
A girl dressed like a passionflower, solicits
Suprasensual cars transmit pheromones,
Chase to their femmes au cinq. Madam Bonnard
Has put the bath-tub behind her.
She is dressed with the fire warming her back.
Her ghostly cat a leap of smoke at her arm.
She is forever patient
But her face says, "Do I have to sit like this
All evening Pierre?"
Tongues of hibiscus french kiss,
Wear their petals like fenetres d’enfer.
Two off duty exotic dancers loop arms
And step it out. Cotton club hostesses
Drink highballs along the zinc bar.
Catch the edge of laughter. Xerox queens
In bouffants pat their hair,
Their leather red arses sat stride the stools.
Felicities to a melancholic girl in black chapeau
Portrait dit de Margot
She is a familiar of the thundercloud and fog,
A harlequin light on Rue Lepic
As it dances with the rain.
The man from the China Moon
Looks out for customers,
Drophead coupes,
Cruising sound systems irradiating,
Drawing you into their gravity pools.
Fobwatch balconies overlook luminous streets
Tense as alarm clocks. A witch-doctor medium
Summons up spirits.
His face held over from a previous life.
Speaks in voices of the dead.
His answerphone chatters catatonically.
Sodium lamps, grey-haired sleepwalkers
Search the rain with divining rods.
Page(s) 11
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- French Literary Review, The
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- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
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- Lamport Court
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- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
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- North, The
- Oasis
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- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
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- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
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- 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