Here are extracts from a selection of the poems from Issue No 5.
Today
I am three hundred and twenty metres tall.
Captured
in the web of your triangles,
Hidden,
intimate, between four thighs,
Spying
on your victims beneath me.
Sun filtering through the grid of your bones
lights them as they wait;
a confetti of colours bobbing
in an innocent curve to the ticket office.
Sucking
them up, your metal cages
glide
through the hollows of your legs,
spilling
them into the hollow of your belly,
draining
their hunger for views into your airiness.
You are monstrous,
Heart of a Nation,
and I am enthralled.
All Winter the snow has comforted these mountains like a cloak
Settling into drifts before stone churches, chalets
Layering into vast in between spaces
Where icy lake waters
Wait out the imposed hibernation
With each day everything shifts a little deeper into itself
Gathers in secret under the surface
Is carried transformed to lower altitudes
All of it in the act of becoming deeper shades of blue
Even the sky retains evaporated moisture
Holding its cobalt profoundness longer against the evening’s
Snow gray horizon
In the bare limbs
Clumps of snow like white cherry blossoms
Like small, still birds
Shift and shrug into the crotch of branches
A blanket kicked to the foot of the bed
Too heavy for the season
Folds inward at the valley crevasse
Haunted brothels, cabarets –
walking cane filled
with un tremblement de terre
his favourite tipple.
But the landscape he strolled was nothing more
than an extra. For Henri
it was people whose limbs he liked to stretch
to fit his fantasy.
His black, deckle-edged crowds would swarm
the dancer with the raised skirts, legs puncturing air,
white glove beckoning her evening-suited beau
with the raked top hat, the hooked nose, hag’s chin.
He plastered Paris with his enormous output:
red, gold, green, purple – the posters dance still
his mix of absinthe and brandy –
the Cancan abandon of heady days.