Bunched up for ardour, all the eels
leave the crush hall standing for
the great cartels of the plain. Eel
is on a fresh course with its own
submission forms and target. Eel
sung-through, but as distinctive in
its mating and feasting gestures as
a journey out and back. Eel as one
of the speaking courtesans; eel as
sweet as an absence panel when
the water rushes the past around
it then runs straight into the past
like a pistol-whip. By this point
the eel is understood to be our
nerve-endings. Tough old wings
stuffed with eel, stuffed in turn in
an overstated take on livery and
breathing in hard red lines. Under
the radar, I will be mandated to
say the oil paid for its own transit:
without it the eel was running and
running but wouldn’t have got us
to the turnpike. An eel has its eye
of you, opens on to a clean window,
and scans for the heat off you in the
jumping fountain, in the tenement
halls it’s still the pigeons’ job to hit.
Jack Belloli is finishing a PhD on experimental theatre at the University of Cambridge. His writing on contemporary poetry has been published in Poetry London, Prac Crit and 3:AM magazine, and his own poetry in The Salt Book of Younger Poets.