Today’s choice

Previous poems

Alison Patrick

 

 

Cepaea nemoralis

A dozen snail shells exposed on dry soil
in the archangel’s cut brown stalks.
Banded like fairground sweets and helter-skelters,
but forget all those frivolous stripey things.
These are brittle, open-mouthed vacancies,
void of the electric currents which pulse calcium
into place, push, make space, turn right,
turn right, turn right around, into pearl and protect,
drive the slow voracious trail for the sappy green and leaf of life
the vegetable reverberation of loam,
before the shiver-shadow
of frost and blackbird,
the shrug-shrink
in and around,
and around.
And seal.
And sleep.

 

 

Alison Patrick studied English at Leeds University in the last century and finally got around to writing poetry a few years ago. She lives in Shropshire and works in a shop. She has been published by Proletarian Poetry, Popshot and Spelt.

Kirsty Fox

Winged     Kirsty Fox is a writer and artist specialising in ecopoetics. She writes lyric essays and poetry, and has had work published by Apricot Press, Arachne Press, and Streetcake Magazine. She has a Masters in Creative Writing and is currently studying...

Jason Ryberg

Sometimes I’d swear that
the ancient box fan I’ve hauled
     around with me for
     years is a receiver for
     the conversations of ghosts

Peter Wallis

Dead in a chest,
 are folded matinee jackets, bonnets, bootees and mitts.

Tissue sighs like the sea at Lowestoft,
   always Third week in August

Amanda Bell

We clipped a window through the currant, sat on folding chairs with keep-cups,
wrapped in blankets as we yelled through the prescribed two-metre gap.
Then took to mending – darning socks and patching favourite denims

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.