Today’s choice
Previous poems
Kevin Denwood
Waiting Room
Name called.
Not mine.
Wasn’t I
here first?
A new arrival
spreads out.
One chair
always left empty.
I glance at copies of
National Geographic,
Vogue,
Woman’s Weekly —
all out of date.
It’s possible
they expired
while I was waiting.
Impatient sighs
mix with the soft
turn of a page.
I glance
around the room.
Nothing catches.
Some scroll frantically.
Others pretend to decipher
The Economist.
Most stare
into space
or at their shoes.
I read the poster
about prostate cancer
again.
Kevin Denwood is a Cumbrian poet whose work explores memory, ageing and everyday social observation. His poems have appeared in Free the Verse, Obsessed with Pipework, and Poems, Tales & Other English Words.
L Kiew
I leave everything on shingle,
meet surf like a sibling,
crest over playful breakers
and chase the moon’s tail.
Margaret Baldock
We launched, lovingly
into dark and silky water
unknown yet benign.
Krishh Biswal
You did not ask for knees —
They found the floor themselves.
Not from command,
But gravity.
Tamara Salih
That winter the snow kept rising,
a slow white wall climbing the windows,
each morning untouched,
Alicia Byrne Keane
I’ve been reading about ghost apples.
They are a real phenomenon, like how
everyone we can see on the wide street
outside this building is still living,
Gareth Culshaw
I tried to work from a van. Sitting in the passenger
seat listening to a guy whistle. His frown, a cloud
he lost when his mother died. Each wrinkle
Jennie Howitt
Those full udders will slowly burst
spitting milk onto the grass strands.
Matt Bryden
at the cider farm, eight minutes
before handover, we strike on
feeding the donkeys –
Colin Pink
to embrace you is like clasping
a fist full of briars