VOTING HAS NOW CLOSED. SEPTEMBER’S PICK OF THE MONTH WILL BE DECIDED IN THE NEXT FEW DAYS.
The body in all its fragility is the the touchstone of our poems shortlisted for the Pick of the Month for September.
Which will touch you most?
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- Claire Booker, ‘Dehydration’: wonder at the care we receive from the medical profession
- Clara-Læïla Laudette, ‘The purpose’, which dances between the monumental and close-relationship humour.
- Grace Lynn, ‘My Little LeBron’: a beautiful and tender love poem for a nephew who is bursting with nascent personhood
- Sandra Noel, ‘The sea happens to me today’, a tender and invigorating poem showing how balance is regained
- David Waters, ‘My Mother’s Hands’: a moving and emotional exploration of many themes through the mother/child relationship
- Dave Wynne-Jones, ‘Sonnet’: the growing ache in this is palpable.
All six of the shortlist have been chosen by Helen, Kate and Elontra or received the most attention on social media. They can be found below. (Please scroll down.)
Our ‘prize’ is £25 towards the charity of your choice or an emailed National Book Token giftcard*.
*Book tokens can only be used within the UK. Sadly, we are unable to find suitable cost-effective alternatives outside the UK.
THE SEPTEMBER 2025 PICK OF THE MONTH SHORTLIST
Dehydration
Never has there been so much interest
in the humble tongue. It peek-a-boos from my mouth
like the little man in a weather clock.
The consultant’s quick look predicts storms in its fur.
She keeps pouring water into my glass as fast
as I can gulp it down – more, yes, more –
working the jug with her right hand, taking my pulse
with the left, eyes fixed on my SpO2 levels.
What couldn’t she do with three arms?
Claire Booker‘s poetry has appeared in Agenda, Dark Horse, Magma and Stand, among others. She won The Poetry Society’s 2023 Stanza Competition, and was longlisted in the 2023 National Poetry Competition. Her collection, A Pocketful of Chalk is out with Arachne Press. Her pamphlet, The Bone That Sang, is with Indigo Dreams.
*
The purpose
I’m six days late and this is known
as a delinquent period.
We’re amused by this
if nothing else.
The first thing you do
after I say pregnancy out loud
is sit on the loo and search
sensory deprivation tank London.
I see you typing as I brush my teeth.
You find one in Angel
three sessions for £90
which seems like a good deal;
tell me about the tonne of salt
guaranteeing buoyancy
the music they play at first
the lid they shut over you
then silence
and I am very touched
by the slim pellucid fear
folding and unfolding
in the space behind your neck.
I spit, say I’ll come too
and you say that would
defeat the purpose
Clara-Læïla Laudette is a writer, facilitator and journalist. She won Magma’s Judge’s Prize, placed third in the Poetry London Prize, and has been shortlisted for the Oxford Poetry Prize, Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, and longlisted for the National Poetry Competition. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Poetry Review, Propel, Beloit Poetry Journal, fourteen poems and Wet Grain, among others.
*
My Little LeBron
For my nephew
Sunlight saunters in long, thin wires through the fallow field
of my bedroom. You approach, a migrating heron
in a runny yolk collar and suntanned shorts, a white-light emissary
of hope. Your nimble night eyes bore into me
like the world’s quietest MRI. I feel reduced
to translucent bone, confused as the shadows shifting
on the wall. The truth is uncomfortable, I tell him,
like wearing a scratchy wool sweater. The summer’s a terror for people
who can’t take it. We wander with no strategy,
no pot of gold, no plan for arrival. How we build houses
to live in, religions to believe in, relationships to love in,
but the primal apes in us know, long before we get born that nothing
abides. I like being alone with my mug
of pain to have something to look forward to,
to nurse. I don’t tell him any of this,
but he hears it anyway. He knows I’m beyond the rim
of understanding. He recites a poem he wrote
about baseball and a bucket list. How he wants to become
Tiger Woods, a chess grandmaster, grandfather a lot of kids,
live long past ninety, donate money, a liver, any piece
of himself to anyone whose needs are greater
than his own. Most importantly, he says,
gravity tugging tears down his cleft chin, he wants to stay
healthy. I clench my fist to give my body something
to do. He is only eight, undulating in the span of his rocking legs
like waves of roses we planted in the backyard.
He goes on about Pokémon cards, how he ate the gross beef stew
camp served on Monday, the chapter book he’s reading all on his own,
pride flitting in the sudden stability of his voice.
He tells me how he tilts his head back as far as it will go
like we did at planetariums to be sure God downloads his wish
for me to walk away from my wheelchair. I am at a loss
for what to say, to do, so I tuck my knees
into my chest, try to put a lid
on my jar of grief before it gives me away. It’s all I can do
to save my nephew, but he tiptoes near to latch
his petite fingers around my forearm and turns his head
upside down to find my hooded gaze. I stare up
at the crocodile on his shirt, hide
in plain sight. He sees the me that is a hoax
of light on glass, and back to when I was doe-eyed,
brave before memory. I tell him about evolution
before he had history to hook onto or a tire-swing
to thread himself through. How he was a tadpole
in artificially fertile skin, his shoots snapping the sidewalk
in tide pools of confetti genes, a wealth of turquoise veins
and a thousand cliques of stars silently spilling
his body’s secret. How his first layup happened
in a nimbus cloud, a heartbeat scored in bright hoops
on a technologist’s grey screen. How he was scooped out
like vanilla ice cream from miscarriages’ frozen-egg defeats
into an offense of ions running laps along axons.
Agar-alive in pulses of movements. An impossible puddle
of parts determined to go on, past white coats
carried by a chemist’s indifferent leash. How he became gelato
in Rome, seashells hurdling a body into free-swimming, a locomotive
caboose skinning its knees, a French accent, barbecue sauce outlining
his mouth into a metronome of checkmate. How he was born
to knowledge never learned in school, of the owl’s midnight time
and place, of the maggots’ wild goose chase.
He cows his soft skin, accepting more of me
than I am able to. I tell him how he moved from in vitro tubes
to a dollhouse apartment, its kitchen just two paces wide, its freezer jam
packed with microwaveable macaroni, its shelf of cereal boxes snug
as the high school corsage his dad set to dry
between pages of old yearbooks. I tell him how he is growing
into slam dunks on asphalt, spring sprigs of mint green.
How inside his heart there’s an entire galaxy of comets roving
the Milky Way. And how here, his face flickers
under my fingertips as he spins silk in the birdcage of my mind,
where I let my love fly beyond these margins in lists
for him.
Grace Lynn is an emerging queer painter who lives with a chronic illness. Her work, forthcoming in Superlative, The Ekphrastic Review, JAMA, Sky Island and other outlets, explores the intersections between faith, the natural world, art and the body. In her spare time, Grace enjoys listening to Bob Dylan, reading suspense novels and investigating absurd angles of art history.
*
The sea happens to me today
not because I’m the woman in the bakers
brusque turned rude
or the peaches still hard in the bowl
skin-touched with mould
I need a reassemble immersion
my flamingo of balance is stuck
on a slope of rough ground
I drive to the lighthouse
where the crosshatch of push
and pull tides argue the way
a woman is shredding a tissue
her eye on a child in the waves
I undress swim close yet far
a mingle of grey over my head
an hour of rain curtaining in
a shift see-saws my body of waters
the woman offers a towel to her loved one
she sinks back into my skin
Sandra Noel is a Jersey born poet with a passion for the sea. Her poems appear in various UK publications. Sandra’s debut collection Into The Under was published in 2024 by Yaffle.
*
My Mother’s Hands
When I was a child my mother’s hands were unremarkable. She never got her nails done or anything crazy like that. We’re talking the 50’s here, in a small Canadian town, a modest religious woman who would never call attention to her physical attributes. Before she went to bed those hands would set the breakfast table, make a sandwich for each child, slice it diagonally, wrap it in wax paper, stuff it in a brown paper bag, and put it in the ice box, ready for school in the morning. You could say she prepared.
I remember her and Grandma knitting together, the clack of needles, the dance of nimble fingers, scarves and mittens and sweaters materializing from nowhere, to squirrel away against inevitable winters. My mother’s hands would stop knitting and drop into her lap when Perry Como crooned through our small black-and-white television. Grandma would cluck her disapproval without missing a stitch.
Rheumatoid arthritis caught my mother in her 30’s. It took her an hour to overcome morning stiffness. She moved slowly and awkwardly. Her joints were swollen and red hot. She often stopped to sigh, but she didn’t complain. God knew what he was doing, she would say if asked, but hardly anyone did. Treatment was primitive then; side effects swamped any benefit. I went away to college, and every time I came home she had shrunk. Her fingers were crooked, so that when she made a fist, her last three fingers landed outside her palm. My father did up her buttons and opened the jars and cans. He stopped going for walks because she couldn’t accompany him.
In her 70’s she progressed from walker to wheelchair. She stopped doing the daily crossword puzzle and forgot things. She called my third wife by my second wife’s name, and sometimes even my first. When he couldn’t look after her anymore, my father found her a nice nursing home. He visited for most of every day, as he had nowhere else to go and nothing to do. When my mother got tired of him he would talk with the lonely widows in the sunroom.
I flew home to visit my mother before she died. Called Home to Glory was how she put it, with a rare smile. I want to shed this earthly body and be free, she said. I wanted to hug her, or at least squeeze her hand, but I had stopped those simple gestures years ago because she would yelp with pain. Not that we were a physically expressive family anyway. We relied on words, and for the first time she told me that she loved me. I had assumed she did, I guess, but she could have mentioned it sooner.
David Waters is a retired cardiologist who lives in San Francisco with his wife and Kerry Blue terrier. His work has appeared in The MacGuffin, Cleaver, JMWW, Peatsmoke Review, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Blue Lake Review, and a dozen others. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He teaches prose and poetry at The Writers Studio.
*
Sonnet
And did she break your heart?
A woman asks, perhaps imagining
A fallen chalice scattering
Fragments about the tiles, only discovered
Days later in corners underfoot.
But there was no suddenness
More a growing sense of doom
A shrivelling of tenderness
The emptiness of a vacated room.
You never choose to love
And when you’ve lost
There’s little left to do
But lick your wounds
Turn the key in the lock.
Dave Wynne-Jones left teaching, gained an MA in creative writing at MMU, then wrote articles for outdoor magazines and organised expeditions for mountaineers. He’s published two books of mountaineering non-fiction, two poetry pamphlets, and poems in anthologies and magazines. www.instagram.com/d.