Today’s choice
Previous poems
A W Earl
Doors
My parents’ house became a place of closed white doors,
where sound hung spare and echoes found no junk
or clutter to rest themselves upon. You move
quietly, in a house like that, learn side-feet,
stop-breath, corner-pause, learn to turn
reverberating handles with a burglar’s touch, learn
the geometries of pristine display.
The corners grow
brighter
the doors are closed
until the noise of you
gasps air-lock to air lock, as though
time could freeze, as though time
could pause its flow, be vacuumed up like dust.
I ran away, all proper, all above board,
the kind of running
that looks good
in picture frames hung on the blank white
of my repainted room.
The doors are closed, the carpet pale,
and from that spare and tidy room
the house has grown, has added to itself
more rooms, more closed white doors
as though it needs more space
to keep its ghosts contained.
A W Earl is a writer, storyteller and poet whose work is concerned with gender, deviant bodies, and folklore. Their poetry has featured in Renard Press, Salò Press and The Selkie. Their debut novel was published by Unbound in 2018.
Rebecca Gethin
Dead-spit My father kept what little he had of my mother in a drawer. It branded his next wife as second. She tipped the contents onto a fire she’d lit in the garden – photos with deckled edges, wedding pictures in card sleeves, snaps of my...
Philip Dunkerley
Medlar Jelly This is going to be a pre-Raphaelite poem about the fruit of the medlar tree that grows in parterres by the West Wing. They leave the fruit long on the tree so that it can blet (good word) to its heart’s content. Then the gardeners...
Dominic Weston
Dead Graham Amuses Himself Dead Graham stands in the doorway eating a family pack of Tyrell’s crisps my crisps Dead Graham isn’t a ghostly thing ghosts were at least alive once he never was Who’s had all my vintage Cheddar? Dead Graham smirks from...
Guy Martyn
Hiding is hiding First it takes away ‘the’ indefinite from your mouth. Then it is its own skin. Space on walls where it used to hang. Edges of time’s slow camera flash burnt like a castle’s kitchen bricks. Then in cracked cards of a book binding...
Ruth Aylett
Physics of sound It’s on the attack; though I turn away it still marches into my head its most effective ambush is from silence a click, a drip, sudden creak, then gone but it can bounce like an acrobat then bounce again.. again.. again strokes my...
Jennifer Horgan
Early Morning Someone spread these crumbs in the dark An off-white offering for city crows Shredded bread like snowflakes in the blackness Caught by the neon glow of the MAXOL sign Where men have begun their work by now Washing metal, checking...
Maggie Sawkins
The House where Courage Lives That night I spent every waking hour staring at my face in the mirror in the darkness. It was the first time I’d looked myself in the eye. In the morning I removed the guard from the fire of my heart, gave careful...
Lance Lee
History Here vineyards spill beyond an autumn hill, each vineyards's grapeleaves a different red or gold, geometric as Cezanne, the arc of the sky a long blue neck by Mondrian. What if the earth breathes its seasons as though alive, for when...
Angela Howarth Martinot
Visit Now that I am here, it’s clear. What I wish for you, Lydia, is that you will be washed up naked and alone on the shore of the Phaiakian’s island, not in this white space with locked doors and that blank-eyed doctor armed with a pile of...