Today’s choice
Previous poems
Irene Cunningham
LULLABY of CALMING – Do you take spec in your tea?
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. Landscapes of folding dimensions intermingle at the drop of an eyelid. Alice meets Titania for lunch with crisp white wine instead of tea. Fizzing accents discuss our failings to hold the world in high esteem – it takes a lifetime to grow into a life, carry the bad, live like glorious humans. Some enchanted future morning I’ll wake, be enamoured by a rose bush tapping at the window, bluest sky behind. I’ll have forgotten who or what I was. A smiling someone will open my door with, Lovely morning. I’ll feel loved. They’ll place a little table on my knees with food waving its aroma. I’ll grasp the fork, pierce lumps of scrambled egg with rolling hills of melted cheese and clap hands as I finish. The daily wandering down corridors peering into paintings means it’ll take forever to mingle in that pleasant state of decay.
Irene Cunningham has poems in many magazines, anthologies over decades. 2019 Hedgehog Press published, SANDMEN: A Space Odyssey, poetry conversation. 2020 FIONA WAS HERE: Amazon. 2022 Dreich Press, No Country for Old Woman. 2023 Amazon: Talking to Walls, and Up@Ground Level.
John Bowen
The Upminster Train We met on the District Line from Wimbledon to Upminster. Chatted all through Southfields. Hands held by Putney Bridge. Our first kiss at a sudden lurch near Parson’s Green. In love as we pulled in at Fulham Broadway. It was all...
Dennis Tomlinson
The Lea at Hertford Around me everything is peaceful. The river flows, willows trail in it and children walk by. Nothing of her suicide abides. Dennis Tomlinson lives in London. His poems have been published recently in Shot...
Barbara Cumbers
Because you’ve never seen one, you ask me about stag beetles What can I tell you now that they’re so rare? Every childhood May or June they came at dawn and dusk, mostly in ones and twos, sometimes formation clouds buzzing, black belly-drop, fuzzy...
Christopher Barnes
ALMANACS 21. Your optics’ fuzz is merciful. Value speckles on mirrors. Above par days have routed. Profess want of upset - Grizzled hairs invade, marauding. 24. Festoon pine 'til glitzy. Shroud bounty in vivid overlays. Letterbox cards will roll....
L Kiew
L Kiew is a Chinese-Malaysian based in London, and works as a charity sector leader and accountant. Her debut pamphlet The Unquiet was published by Offord Road Books (2019). She was a 2019/2020 London Library Emerging...
Jinny Fisher
Containment I drive your lemon yellow Smart ForTwo six hundred miles home from your flat— stuffed to the roof, my suitcase crammed on top, your miniature car swells to welcome a pile of your leavings, rescued from Junk-It Ltd. house clearance:...
Manon Ceridwen James
A Parishioner Complains at a Parish Church Council When We Move the Time of Evensong You have changed the Bible you have changed the words in the service you have brought in girls to serve at the altar and women can now be sidesmen and any minute...
John Newton Webb
A dental technician rips up a postcard of dental puns Have you known the suffering wrought by damaged mouths? Or the solemn joy of healing? Have you reckoned with the uses of dental records? Think through the murdered and the long dead; think of things...
Simon Alderwick
coffee and the interconnectedness of all things i like the darkness of it, the bitterness, the ring of light reflected on the surface. i like the story. the crushed beans. the crop growing on the side of a mountain. i like the journey, but in...