Today’s choice
Previous poems
Tina Cole
What Mr. Pig Did
After Paula Rego Prince Pig and his First Bride 2006
Mr. Pig modelling his best Sunday suit of farmyard smells,
flees from the cook’s cleaver to find himself a sow.
This snorty, stinky, porker seeks a succulent female
but finds a golden version of that wonderland Alice
losing herself to the canopy of stars expanding above,
eyes wide, mouth shut. She is clever, passes off her repulsion
as the chill she always feels inside and out, knowing
his simple brain will believe her. His loathsome heaviness
begins a performance of sucking and licking, filthy trotters
kicking hard as a Channel swimmer. He fumbles over the hump
and bowl of her, fearful tusks moving closer to steal ludicrous kisses
that snouty lips can hardly manage. And then that little kettle squeal
like cats fighting in the garden late at night is almost more
than she can bear. They will stay tangled like this until it’s over
or until Alice draws a butcher’s knife from beneath her galaxy
of foaming petticoats waits for blood to cool, clot, coagulate.
Tina Cole has three published pamphlets, I Almost Knew You, (2018), Forged/ Yaffle Press, (2021) and What it Was/ Mark Time Books (2023). Her published poems have appeared in many U.K. magazines, one in The Guardian newspaper and in several poetry collections. She is also a past winner of a number of national poetry competitions 2010 – 2023. She completed an M.A. in creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2024.
Mark Connors
Mark Connors is a poet from Leeds. Life is a Long Song was published by OWF Press in 2015, Nothing is Meant to be Broken by Stairwell Books in 2017. Optics was published by YAFFLE in 2019 and After in 2021. www.markconnors.co.uk.
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