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

I’m waiting for my turn at the salon, a rumpelstiltskin of a woman rubbing
                                                                        red dye
into a trapezist’s hair, her painting of hair, her aerial dress still in its blue
                                                                        bath.
I don’t know who to look at most. Outside the window, birds confetti over
                                                                        the water.

A god, a vulcan, could forge a bullet from the grey surf tinted green, a
                                                                        melted silver mine
with flecks of ice evaporating into the mix, the clouds blowing over like a
                                                                        jump rope,
sun, and then dark, and then sun, so much wind and birds, like blackened
                                                                        scraps flying up

from a fire, ruminants of yesterdays sky, red as a kiss starting its journey.
                                                                        The woman
looks up from her gloved hands, and says, ‘In Vegas, they are just starting.
                                                                        I have seen
just how they start…’ And she is all of the sudden looking at nothing, and
                                                                        I’m thinking

movement itself is packed up inside this trapezist, who dozes under the 
                                                                        stylist like a secret,
movement and strength enough to impoverish these beauty shop sounds
                                                                        with carnival, as the Cirque’s
wonderful twenty girls do, their bright hair flying while they hold and jump
                                                                        eight ropes

spinning a Spanish Web, and a bullet might be shooting through them,
                                                                        they move
so like a throb, their every muscle repeating, ‘Begin.’