Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jeff Skinner
Erato
It takes ages. Tell me what it is you’re after
she says, when finally I get through.
Rain, I answer, rain that falls softly
in a garden, and on the Aegean,
the noise they make together,
trees in the rain, and the way rain brightens
the green leaves and the blue tiles
shine like new. Is that everything? she asks
and I say, yes it is, for the moment, yes.
Jeff Skinner’s poems have been published in anthologies and journals, most recently in Poetry News, Allegro, Drawn to the Light. He was commended in the recent Sonnet or Not competition. He volunteers at his local food bank, reads, writes.
Anne Symons
She was only a little woman
five feet nothing in nylon stockings.
‘If I stood sideways they’d mark me absent.’
Ben
When she said ‘could’, it was clearly in italics
and when she said ‘one day’, the creak of glaciers
shuddered around its edges.
Dragana Lazici
the days are long but the years are short.
seconds are tiny kitchen knives in my back.
i stopped reading Dickinson, her voice is a sad parrot.
Abigail Ottley
Faces, unless they come swimming up close. are a blur of piggy-pink and ice-
cream. In the street, she doesn’t know, cannot be certain when to smile, when to
look away
Maggie Mackay
The teacher is an old spindly man. Grim, out of a Grimm’s tale. Scarecrow hair, thinning. Unsmiling.
Natasha Gauthier
The tawny clutch appeared
on high-heeled evenings only,
slept in a nest of white tissue.
Romy Morreo
She only speaks to me these days
through groaning floorboards in the night
and slammed doors.
Emma Simon
No-one has seen a ghost while breast-feeding
despite the unearthly hours, the half-light
mad sing-song routines of rocking a child
back to sleep.
Kushal Poddar
The furniture covered in once
transparent now foggy sheets
craft the room a morgue, and we
identity the bodies