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

fiction

Issue No. 9

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author James Murphy's Notes on Nicola Morelli Berengo

Francesco Pacifico

TR. Livia Franchini

fiction

Issue No. 9

Biography | Cattolicissimo trio composed of mother father beloved son. God, why doesn’t the English language have an equivalent...

Art

Issue No. 17

Water

Batia Suter

Art

Issue No. 17

Sources: Achate, Bilder im Stein / Josef Arnoth, Naturhistorisches Museum Basel Buchverlag, Bild der Wissenschaft 12, Dezember 1971, DVA StuttgartBasler Zeitung, Birkhäuser...

fiction

May 2015

A History of Money

Alan Pauls

TR. Ellie Robins

fiction

May 2015

He hasn’t yet turned fifteen when he sees his first dead person in the flesh. He’s somewhat astonished that...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required