Today’s choice
Previous poems
Ned Vessey
Conversations
My father and I
skim the surface of conversations
something like those swallows do
down at the lake
instantaneous precision
of withheld effort
brief furrows
of beak and wing
on water’s brows.
But sometimes we forget
ourselves
the pub sends us
into the drink. Cormorants
beaks that know
surgery of water
peel back gloom and grit
until the innermost things
of the lake choke
writhe on the shoreline
unaccustomed
to the scrutiny of light.
Fearful we let the lake
have them back
and no one says a word.
Ned Vessey writes poetry and prose about landscape, people and place. His prose has been featured in The Guardian, Slightly Foxed Quarterly and The Clearing. His poetry has appeared in The Dark Mountain. He lives in Bath.
J.S.Watts
On Neptune Street
you may dream of the tide,
its drag and lure
but your feet walk
on solid pavement.
Jenny Hockey
Crouched above the stream he dug,
known by his kid-along brother
as the dry gulch, its circulation pump
rarely switched on
Hannah Coyle
Peach skin wrists,
Watch persists
Her through time
Suffusing.
Mike Anderton
The peach stone is in my pocket.
I keep rubbing it
while you talk about rain.
Anthony Lawrence
One had a ball of water that magnified the word shiver
on its cap, and one had been torn and thrown
against the wood, a soft bomb, leaving gills and skin.
Ewen Glass
Listening to a memoir
and discovering the writer’s dog
is on the same SSRI as you
is an odd feeling;
Raluca David
You said you’d never die
here.
Tony D’Arpino
like a lover
the bee visits the tree
every day
Sam Szanto
He had been told the trolley
would be in the corridor at noon.
He could get sandwiches.
It was normally for mothers only