We move from the sublime to the surreal in February’s Pick of the Month shortlist, from milk and lunch breaks through barbecue to the Wonder Oven and a land without clocks, from the freedom of remission to love birds’ not-so-gilded cage. It’s a rich and marvellous group of poems. So which will you choose?
- Oliver Comins, ‘Milk break, lunch break’: vivid and nostalgic, beautifully capture the contrast between a vibrant past and a muted present.
- Steph Ellen Feeney, ‘Ode to Remission’: signposting loss that might have been, might still happen; truly bittersweet.
- Bob KIng, ‘You Know What 9am Feels Like, Right?…’ : an hour of this life when an epiphany might startle upon you.
- Julie Sheridan, ‘Love Birds’: a striking blend of tenderness and confinement, enriched by vivid sensory details.
- Maxine Sibihwana, ‘Barbecue’: fragmented rhythm creating a vivid, chaotic tableau of family and faith.
- Ellora Sutton, ‘Medea’: a take on the myth as domestic housewifely claustrophobia.
All six of the shortlist have been chosen by Helen, Kate and IB or received the most attention on social media. They can be found below. (Please scroll down.)
Please VOTE HERE. Voting will close at 6pm on Wednesday 26 March.
Our ‘prize’ is £20 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 FEBRUARY 2025 PICK OF THE MONTH SHORTLIST
Milk break, lunch break
Working the land on good days, after Easter,
people would hear the breaks occur at school,
children calling as they ran into the playground,
familiar skipping rhymes rising from the babble.
An ample fence stood between them and the farm
where their voices entwined with summer air,
sounds of village families, echoes of belonging.
Between the breaks, a country silence rose—
various nestling of feet in grass, a distant thuck
of axe on wood and that sibilance of leaves.
The school is closed now, converted, gone.
There are no breaks to freshen up the days
or disperse the background rumble of transport.
The hills are closing in, their strict rows of pine.
Oliver Comins recently returned to the Midlands after living in the Thames Valley and West London for many years. His poetry is collected by The Mandeville Press and Templar Poetry.
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Ode to Remission
My mother is here, and might not have been,
so I hold things tighter:
the small-getting-smaller of her
running with my daughter down the beach,
every conch and whelk they gather,
the scar tissue just peeking out
of her swimsuit, her phone number
the only one on Earth I know by heart,
the way she watches pelicans dive-bomb
for breakfast like it’s a show she’s got tickets for,
her expectations hovering everywhere –
without them, I’d be so awfully free.
My mother is here, and might not have been,
so we get up early and walk:
the soles of our feet on the shell-shard beach
hurting just the right amount.
We drink too many cocktails.
I let her kiss my curls the same as hers
like I’m still five. We build sandcastles
with my daughter, as far
from the claws of the tide as we can,
as deep-moated as we can,
as tall in their armor of shells as we can,
knowing we will wake to not even a trace of turret.
My mother is here, and might not have been,
so we do it all over again.
Steph Ellen Feeney was born in Louisiana and raised in Texas and now lives in Suffolk. IS&T was her very first publication in 2021 – a poem called ‘The Brief Invisibility of Fathers’. It will appear in her debut collection which is forthcoming with Broken Sleep Books.
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You Know What 9am Feels Like, Right? Like, If Your Watch & All Clocks—Suddenly Worldwide—Disappeared, You’d Still Know What 9am Feels Like, Right?
The first wristwatch was first worn
in 1810, despite what old turn-it-up
Flintstones episodes might have you
believe. But we all need to believe
in something, which is why at least
93% of us have chosen at least one
to follow. Even if tenants-of-the-faith
aren’t really acted upon 6½ days out
of 7. But hey, It looks good on the social
resume. That rhyme wasn’t intended
for you. You know what it feels like
when you’ve broken something
you loved, a sentimental trinket
on your dining room breakfront
from your great-great-grandmother.
But for the life of you, you can’t
remember if it was the maternal or
paternal grandma. It feels like ferns.
It feels like hot coffee. There’s a fire,
mostly warming embers. Maybe
books. Excessive light & houseplants.
The fallen ash almost in a straight line,
the sandalwood ash, the burnt bitty
twig a reminder of a once upon a time
forest. Light snowfall, but it’s warm
enough that you kick your socks off
your heels & leave them like mittens
on your toes. It feels like it’s a nice
enough morning, the sun is doing
his best to breakthrough, & you finally
decided to forgive. To forgive
yourself for that thing you’ve really
been beating yourself up for lately.
Lately & a lot longer than lately, once
again, if we’re really being honest with
each other. It may be my favorite of
all the hours. Screw you, 3 O’clock.
You know what it feels like, right?
You know what it feels like to for
once celebrate, right? To celebrate
the fact that you finally, maybe
for the first time ever, know how
to celebrate yourself?
Bob King is an English Professor at Kent State University at Stark. His poetry collection And & And published in August 2024. ‘And/Or’ is forthcoming in September 2025. Recent nominations include 3 Pushcart Prizes & 3 BoTN. New work appears in LEON Literary Review, The Broken Spine, & Allium: A Journal of Poetry & Prose. He lives in Fairview Park, Ohio.
*
Love Birds
Agapornis
They married in a chapel of black steel
bars, tethered up their feathers to serve as
stained glass. One year in and their chirrups are still
hymeneal. Humans can’t help but pass
by and beam at this pair, bonded for life.
All day long they practice their craft, the dry
squelching sound of vows, the wings of the wife
splaying to blue as if to an actual sky.
Look, they’re at it again. He heaves up seed
to feed her, to prove his paternal credentials,
she swallows and hatches the clutch. What need
isn’t met in this cage, in this unfledged embrace?
All day long that muffling sound, the heel
of a hand kneading the palm of another.
Julie Sheridan lives in Barcelona. Her work has appeared in journals including Poetry Ireland Review, Mslexia, Poetry Scotland, Dream Catcher, The Ekphrastic Review and Anthropocene. She was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize in both 2023 and 2024.
*
Barbecue
here, water does not run. instead it
sits obediently in old plastic containers
here, where monkey steals avocado
when window is open, here where
white jesus hangs from the cross and
weeps into the food, where father is a tree
and mother is an oil spill,
and aunties spawn to season each dish
with gossip and the Lord’s Prayer,
and minutes are two weeks long
and the clock betrays
and the cockerel plays with the children
before its descent into charcoal and oil
fire and brimstone
Maxine Sibihwana is a London-based poet and writer from Uganda. Her work explores themes of love, shame, and questioning religious rituals, and has been published in Notebook by MUBI,Die Quieter Please, AFREADA, Lolwe and the James Currey Anthology of African Literature. Maxine was a member of the 2024 Born:Free Writers’ Collective and is on the current cohort of the Emerging Writers Programme with the London Library.
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Medea
My heart is breaking, so I’m setting up my new Wonder Oven.
The waft of toxicity as I run it on empty for ten minutes
is a welcome distraction.
Do you know what a Wonder Oven is?
Let me tell you.
A Wonder Oven is so much more than just an airfryer.
It has six different functions. It doesn’t even
look like an airfryer; the ad on the Tube reminded me
of the toy oven I used to make stone soup in, lavender-seasoned
fistfuls of gravel from my grandmother’s garden.
My Wonder Oven is so perfect, it’s exactly what I need.
It can roast a 2kg chicken in 50 minutes.
It purrs like a lantern. My Wonder Oven
is pink, halfway between blush and bronzer,
a limited-edition colour the website called ‘Spice’.
I felt so lucky. Did I put on weight?
Maybe I did put on weight, I understand that’s what
happens to happy people. The sheer fucking whimsy of it.
It really does look like a toy, but it charrs like the real thing.
I am learning to swallow my children, even when
I’m not hungry. I’ve forgotten what hunger is. God,
the person I was when I ordered my Wonder Oven!
How long does it take to digest a child? My Wonder Oven
only took a week to arrive. It sits there like a torture chamber,
between the toaster and kettle, wafting.
I was going to buy him a kettle for Christmas. Have you ever
cared about anyone like that? Before the Wonder Oven,
I could never have understood how a woman
might bake her own children in a pie, her milk for liquor,
how she might not flinch
burning her knuckles on the oven door, the heating element
a twisted wire hanger. How she might transcend one final time
giving her man exactly what his mother asked for,
eye contact whilst he swallows, washing it down
with wine that isn’t wine.
I would give anything to be that animal
spread thickly over warm bread,
to excrete that animal.
My Wonder Oven dings when it’s done,
so I don’t even have to worry about keeping time.
Was home ever anything other than this?
The kitchen is so warm. It’s unbearable.
Ellora Sutton is a poet and PhD student based in Hampshire. Her work has been published in The Poetry Review, Oxford Poetry, Berlin Lit, and beyond. Her pamphlets include Antonyms for Burial (Poetry Book Society Spring 2023 Pamphlet Choice) and Artisanal Slush.