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.
Anna Bowles
Nothing bad can happen on a plane.
Engine fires, earache, hijackers; but no new grief.
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
Anna Maughan
Illness had left me
brittle as frost, icicle-thin
swaddled in borrowed warmth
Angeliki Ampelogianni
on marble tiles bird like
I am a pin measuring drops in the toilet bowl
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.
Finola Scott
Winter dusk soughs in, dark
clouds threaten, tangle her wool.