Today’s choice

Previous poems

Britta Giersche

 

 

 

3am

a wooden door slams shut in my brain

a man perishes in a space the size of his grave from malnutrition eighty years ago

(I travel on my mother’s electric waves that held their spoken words’ shape)

I am sorry that the thud left a hole in your dream like a lost stitch in a schoolgirl’s needlework

the drumming of car tyres forms a mirror-like sound on the asphalt road

a beam of light casts a languorous glance over our bodies

for six seconds

(the length of a yawn)

I catch the warm updraft, rising from your breathing

 

Britta Giersche is German. She lives in London and is writing her first book of poetry.

Emily A. Taylor

I move my hand long
so yours will follow, and though
this moment tastes of tequila soda
paracetamol pillowed on a fizzing tongue
amnesia… pull me in anyway.

Steph Morris

No way would they let him keep that tag. They saw
a boy they must rename, must mark
from them, a boy whose limbs folded far too gently,

Eryn McDonald

It is here that the day breaks apart
Like ice on frustrated frozen pond
Here in the grounds of Ashton Court
I wish to bury myself amongst the green

Stephen Keeler

The days were huge and kind
and sometimes after school

we’d buy a bag of broken biscuits
for the long walk home

across the heavy heat of afternoon
on lucky days she wouldn’t take

the pennies offered up in supplication

Joseph Blythe

I swear I felt the swirly patterned paper
rip from the walls of my childhood bedroom.
It was the same stained cream shade as my skin –
pockmarked, cut and scabbed, dry and peeling…..