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| Issue 33: | August 2026 |
| Poem: | 136 words |
By Phil Powrie
Asparagus (after Proust)
Asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white feet, still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed: a rainbow-loveliness that was not of this world.
—Swann’s Way*
asparagus were for Proust ultramarine blushed fairies in rainbow loveliness, delicate pinkos in slender party costumes tottering high heels splattered by gutter mud, fleshy creatures of the dawn stumbling back home, screeching coarse drunken jests— but he forgot the sensuous tactility of the penis-like fronds as you strip them ready to be sucked with butter or vinaigrette, forgot that Françoise’s hands knew what his eyes refused: the vegetable’s frank arousal, the guilty pleasure of consumption. he was just a voyeur, too timid to feel it.
*Swann’s Way is Volume 1 of In Search of Lost Time, the seven-volume novel by French novelist, literary critic, and essayist Marcel Proust (1871–1922), published between 1913 and 1927.
Phil Powrie
is an English-French former academic, based in the UK. He has published poetry in both languages. His work in English has been published in Blue Unicorn; FERAL: A Journal of Poetry and Art; Fragmented Voices; Green Ink Poetry; The Lincoln Review; morphrog; October Hill Magazine; The Orchards Poetry Journal; La Piccioletta Barca; and Pollux Journal, amongst others.
Author’s website: https://philpowrie.com/creative/
More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond
⚡ Collisions, prose by Phil Powrie in morphrog 32 (January 2026)
⚡ Taut Shadows, prose in The Lincoln Review (Issue 6, 2025)
⚡ Winds, poem by Powrie in Green Ink Poetry (30 December 2024)
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