Zeeba Ansari
A Mattress
Take a turn about this temple of scuffed
and sagging air,
through its litter
of densely laid sweats,
crumpled tubes of sleep,
blunted groans half-stretched at silence.
Duck around
those threads that hang
unfinished
like a failure to please –
they move only in the human way,
briefly tensed, rubbed loud, then still.
Look up at a sky
sprung with diamonds
raced by steel feet through
patterned satin-bursts,
even tracks of double stitching
lending hand and restraint to
vertical stress.
All manner of detritus shores here:
late-night stains of habit,
squeezed sounds of
afternoon and need,
an ever-present muffle of lashes faking sleep,
double-beaded moisture like a trophy
of the times when desires
pressed well together at the springs
and bounced the dust.
Loose drawings of fantasy behind closed eyes
drift in light-pricked black –
crushed and lifted,
crushed and lifted,
vague faces with rub-off mouths
skeltered on spiral steel,
swum with the effort of recreation.
Page(s) 46-47
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