" title="Brittle Star Julia Lewis
Dream of the Singing Graveyard
Marble headstones. Flatstones.
White; yolk-delicate veined.
Deep-fluted bellied urns
and smooth cool pages.
Spaced, wealthy, silenced.
Only necklace ivy, spiralling
round slab and column,
stirred: a webfoot creature
unitracking upwards, slight
against the mass, live
against th’unlive, lithe
against th’unbending.
Most green, it seemed,
to all that white. And then.
Those buried treasure-chests,
their lungs their larynxes
their pharynxes, because
they could they did –
they sighed. A vocalise,
a hum, allowed new breath
old alleyways. From ground,
from grave, neighbour to
neighbour rumbled, spread
the modal exhalations
from the mouldering
dead. And then. No.
And when. The swell had
thickened, risen, purpling
the air, it curdled pure
harmonics, pleating chords
in sweetening clusters over
cherub stare and bleached
straw daffodil, until
the rediscovered plaintives
conjured one invisible,
indivisible choir
from call and answer,
restlessness and requiem. None
survived the breaking waters.
Page(s) 14-15
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