Most Read... John McAuliffeBill Manhire in Conversation with John McAuliffe
(PN Review 259)
Patricia CraigVal Warner: A Reminiscence
(PN Review 259)
Joshua WeinerAn Exchange with Daniel Tiffany/Fall 2020
(PN Review 259)
Eavan BolandA Lyric Voice at Bay
(PN Review 121)
Vahni CapildeoOn Judging Prizes, & Reading More than Six Really Good Books
(PN Review 237)
Christopher MiddletonNotes on a Viking Prow
(PN Review 10)
Next Issue Between Languages, Howard Cooper 'Ur-language' Oksana Maksymchuk 'Multifarious Beast' Zinovy Zinik 'My Mother Tongue, My Fatherland' Philip Terry 'Lost Languages' Victoria Moul 'Bad Latin, Barbarous Inglishe'
Poems Articles Interviews Reports Reviews Contributors
Reader Survey
PN Review Substack

This poem is taken from PN Review 256, Volume 47 Number 2, November - December 2020.

The Fools and other poems Lucy Tunstall
The Fools

The way they walked to church over the fields and made everything milk white.
The way the heat-haze took them out by the ankles and that cloud of white
hair that could actually have been cloud. The way they swam in and out
of sight like a pair of stupid moons behind clouds, a kind of cut-out
flatness that made you want to push them all the way over
and drive a steamroller over them real slow.



Machine

I married a machine that could reconfigure itself. The machine
survived everything. The function of the machine was to burn fuel.

The machine made everything machine-brand – machine-brand
coffee, machine-brand daisies, machine-brand duvet-cover.

My eyes were very heavy when I looked at the machine. To me
the machine looked like a machine, but to other people it looked
like other things.

Parts of the machine were vintage to show originality. The vintage
...


Searching, please wait... animated waiting image