Today’s choice
Previous poems
Nigel King
Coal House Fort
Turn the mud. Bo Peep’s head tumbles out,
wide-eyed, mouth a little open.
There’s no sign of her body,
her crook, her flock. Perhaps
they’re deeper in the riverbed,
or washed down to Tilbury by the tide.
Drop her into the wooden trug
alongside three musket balls,
half an upper denture, endless
bits of lustre ware.
The boy I was, who crept through
the dark, unsecured passages
beneath Coal House Fort
would have reached first for the musket balls,
felt their dead weight in his hand,
thrust them into his pocket.
He’d have poked at the denture
in thrilled disgust, perhaps thought
of that glass by his Granddad’s bed,
the thing floating there like a broken clam.
Bo Peep he’d have left in the mud.
Nigel King lives in Huddersfield, UK. He has had poems published in Poetry Salzburg Review, The High Window, and Algebra of Owls (amongst others). His pamphlet What I Love About Daleks was published by Calder Valley Poetry.
Chrissy Banks and Antony Owen (from the IS&T archives) for Holocaust Memorial Day
Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep Goodnight moon, goodnight stars, goodnight cherry, pear, apple tree. Goodnight pond, stop wriggling, newts, stop zipping the water, water-boatmen. Goodnight, glossy horses on the hill, rabbits in the field, white...
Clare Bryden
how do I begin?
Yvonne Baker
an etherial whiteness
that covers and disguises
as a strip of white frosted glass
Hilary Thompson
Ambling up North Street
on a Saturday afternoon
at the end of a long Winter,
I am stopped by two women
Irene Cunningham
Lavender seeps. I expect my limbs to leaden, lead the body down through sheet, mattress-cover, into the machinery of sleep where other lives exist.
Graham Clifford
The Still Face Experiment
You must have seen that Youtube clip
where a mother lets her face go dead.
Her toddler carries on burbling for twenty to thirty seconds until she realises there is nothing coming back to her.
Susan Jane Sims
After you died,
someone asked:
What was it like
in those final sixteen days
waiting for your son to die?
Jane Frank
I imagine returning to the house.
Furniture is piled up in the rain—
the ideas that won’t fit.
Ilias Tsagas
I used to dial your number to hear your voice. I would hold the receiver for a long time as if your voice was trapped inside . . .