Today’s choice

Previous poems

Rebecca Wheatley

 

 

 

Muscle memory

He thought his heart was broken yet the day began again.
He couldn’t marvel in the shine of sunsets rising and falling
and yet he rose and fell in turn.
His hands resigned themselves to tea making
and his legs carried him much the same.
He bundled her belongings into bin liners
and his heart told him it was not her in those bags,
reminded him of her wisdom and her nonsense,
showed her soft face enveloped in the folds of drawn curtains.
His heart hammered so relentlessly he struggled to hold on to it.
Caught unawares by her handwriting on a scribbled note,
her smile in a photo he hadn’t seen,
a grieving friend he couldn’t remember.
Swelling and contracting it sounded the rhythm of his day,
asking so much of him that he sometimes had to lay down and hide.
Not broken, conjuring love from the loss with every last muscle.
His heart had never worked so hard or been more alive.

 

 

Rebecca Wheatley is poet, actress and singer in Brighton. She tours her own one woman shows with music and has poems published in The tide rises , Dreitch, Bindweed, Porridge, The New Ulster’ ,Southlight. Galway Review and Salzburg Journal.

Magnus McDowall

We rolled out on Seven Sisters Road,
two crates of Tyskie empty in my stairwell.

We were talking from the chest, walking backwards
crackling air above our heads like streetlights

Sarah Boyd

He’s a house of cards, a delicately balanced pyramid
held together by hearing aids and dusty bifocals and
wobbling dentures and ageing pacemaker and
shirt with three buttons missing in action and

Samantha Carr

You became obsessed with nucleated red blood cells when you peeked through an
aperture window at your liquid, viscous nature. You became obsessed with maps

Helen Akers

we’re trying to construct a frame for this
‘highly reactive impulsive emotion’
the nurse is looking into it   

Jenny Robb

By the light of a wolf moon,
my father turns mad.
Anne whispers to a girl in the wind,
and a friend blows into my life.