share


Bacon’s Friends

Always got caught out by their shadows:

Stuck to their soles like monkeys on trapezes,

Cellophane fortune tellers curling on palms,

Squashed black jelly babies.  Naïve beside his

 

Cunning swirls: ugly blobs leaking like ink

Out of the cages that held their likenesses.

Glimpsed through cheeks or at the back

Of yawning, unravelled mouths.

 

Keep looking at the shadows, the shadows

That try to love their creator

While their doubles shave obscenely

Or choose stubbornly to read the newspapers.

 

 

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR

has published poetry, short stories, critical essays and travel writing in magazines in the UK and internationally.  He was runner-up in the Elmet Foundation Ted Hughes Poetry Prize. His work appears on the Poetry Library archive, for which he has made recordings.

READ NEXT

Interview

February 2017

Interview with Hajra Waheed

Rebecca Travis

Interview

February 2017

This conversation with Hajra Waheed began in person with an opportune meeting at her Montreal studio in April 2016....

feature

Issue No. 20

Editorial

The Editors

feature

Issue No. 20

    As a bookish schoolchild in Galilee, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was invited to compose, and read...

fiction

March 2017

Slogans

Maria Sudayeva

TR. Antoine Volodine

TR. Jeffrey Zuckerman

fiction

March 2017

A Few Words on Maria Sudayeva   Slogans is a strange, extraordinary book: it describes a universe of total...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required