Today’s choice
Previous poems
Daniel Cartwright-Chaouki
The Lean-to Glasshouse
Its timber frame held together by the waste
of its own decay
The rot a kind of glue undisturbed
Cracked panes of glass hold their fractures
still
Hearts tongue ferns grow beneath
the dripping tap
And at the end in the damp where
all the water pools at the bottom of the sloping
shingle path
Bricks crumble to dust
Their profile left behind
miniature terracotta towns in relief
Grey plastic sockets intrude
Dried cardoon heads hang upside down
from routed conduit pipe
Loose stacks of brick and timber slats
make staging for rows and rows of potted
plants
This is where things grow
The wind threatens with a conditioned
response
So I cup my hands to catch it
And wait for somebody to say
words like short unexpected illness
And devastating loss
Daniel Cartwright-Chaouki is a gardener and writer from Birmingham, England. He writes about trees and plants (mostly) and people (sometimes) and other unimportant things. His work has featured widely both in print and online.
Rosie Jackson
I Am Trying to Love Frank O’Hara More
I really am! I am trying not to see his exclamation marks as cheap melodrama and his endless conjunctions as some kind of separation anxiety or fear of mortality for what do full stops signify except dying
Charlotte Holm, Jennifer A McGowan
A leaky drainpipe drips
creating damp patches on uneven paving,
slime green algae blossoms
forming viridescent ripples
James McDermott
if samsara’s concrete please don’t come back
as black jackal for I live in Norwich
nor spineless worm as I don’t have a lawn
Cheryl Snell, Alice Gregorio, Peter Lilly
I grew up on a farm so I should know all about expensive cows and free milk. You’re taking being a debutante much too literally. We only meant to give permission for you to make a good match, not flit among the suitable boys…
Jade Kleiner
There is the green that birthed all pine trees.
Tom Blake
We were the housing and the housed,
meaning nothing except that
we were always occupied,
or to put it simply never out.
Kate Bonfield
Coming home to days of heat
trapped beyond the door, to time skewed
by time away, the house bigger and
smaller than before.
Precious Ejim
I don’t know why I look to my mother
for her shadow never stays.
Jackson
I want to tell my mother,
I made a successful loaf
in the bread machine you didn’t know
you were leaving me