Two short pieces today – by Jo Overfield and Esther Poyer…


Southend, Southend

Southend, Southend, how does your garden grow?
With concrete slabs and shopping centre domes,
And Starbucks all in a row.


* Jo Overfield is a writer, performance poet, podcast presenter and film geek.
She runs the arts event Sundown in Southend-on-Sea.
She writes a large range of literature from poetry to short stories to
sketches and has written for BBC Radio 4, TotalDVD magazine, Electric
Sheep and more. She is also trying to learn to play the ukelele.

blind date
 
his back to my searching eye in cosmopolitan throng at city tube station

dark curly hair almost shoulder length his Celtic frame leaning

an iPod on I wonder what he’s listening to and casually ask as much

“Groove Armada” he says mobile phones pressed to ears

he had me as I tumbled into the emphasis on the groove

* Esther Poyer is a fiction writer and poet; a performer of poetry; an MA Creative Writing student at Birkbeck University. She lives in London with her teenage son and likes to potter about in her garden, complete with vegetable patch.