Today’s choice
Previous poems
Tess Jolly
Fish and Chips
When I went round the next day
with a bottle of wine, his wife said
he was bruised down both sides
from squeezing through
our upstairs bathroom window.
He’d been on his way to get more fish
from the freezer at the end of their garden
when he saw us next door:
you, scared of heights, stopped
around four rungs up,
and me, heavily pregnant, holding the base
and weakly cheering you on.
He jumped over the fence
and did what needs must,
no locksmith needed, and Josie,
still asleep in her cot, none the wiser,
though his customers must have wondered
what was taking so long –
Friday night and the queue spilling
along the street as he ascended –
until he appeared with a smile
and a How can I help?,
went back to the everyday work
of stirring flour and milk into gold.
Tess Jolly has published two collections, Intimate Architecture and Breakfast at the Origami Café, both with Blue Diode Press. She lives with her family on the south coast of the UK, where she runs her freelance editing business: www.poemsandproofs.co.uk.
Jenny Mitchell
There’s no one in the flat when I come home from school,
my dinner in the fridge – poison on a flowered plate,
covered with tin foil, surrounded by full shelves of poison.
Sarah James/Leavesley
The sister I don’t have
has pockets bulging
with silver-foiled chocolate
Andy Humphrey
On screen, Dad was
the radical –
the introverted
pen-and-notepad kind,
Chrissy Banks
Sun comes out, my body opens
all its folding doors, its windows.
mulika ojikutu-harnett
remember when we lived
in the shrubs? stewed in a shared
room. its stench. our own
L.B. Jørgensen
As the whole town picked sugar beets,
their breath hugged
furrows in pre-dawn darkness.
Mel Joy
a line of hanging hooks
bent us into the dining hall
where we ate like birds
Judith Taylor
He reads aloud about visiting the Underworld in dreams,
seeing his dead again. Through the big window behind him
there’s a flowerbed and some long grass
Anne Symons
Magic Pennies My dad was a magician. He could make a penny disappear with a twist of his wrist just vanish in thin air to pluck it later from your ear or nose. People laughed when dad did that. He’d put a matchstick in the centre of a clean white...