Today’s choice
Previous poems
Kathy Pimlott
Going down to do lights and curtains to fool any burglars
Twilight: one after another security lights click on
illuminating pathways, steps, empty front lawns,
triggered by my benign progress, then, disappointed,
click off. The sky is a layer cake of contrails, pink
shepherds’ delight and darkness holding a waxing moon
two days short of being Wolf.
All done, street lamps
cast my long shadow so it circles me as 1 walk back.
It grows and shrinks, scales walls. Sensing something
behind me, I stop, turn. There she stands, fox-smart
from nose tip to tail. I wait. She does too. I don’t run.
I say, ‘Off you go. This is my life not a Lawrence novella’.
Frost sets the road crackling as robins shout the night in.
Kathy Pimlott has a collection, the small manoeuvres, with Verve Poetry Press (2022) and three pamphlets with The Emma Press –Elastic Glue and Goose Fair Night and most recently After the Rites and Sandwiches (2024). www.kathypimlott.co.uk
James McDermott
if samsara’s concrete please don’t come back
as black jackal for I live in Norwich
nor spineless worm as I don’t have a lawn
Cheryl Snell, Alice Gregorio, Peter Lilly
I grew up on a farm so I should know all about expensive cows and free milk. You’re taking being a debutante much too literally. We only meant to give permission for you to make a good match, not flit among the suitable boys…
Jade Kleiner
There is the green that birthed all pine trees.
Tom Blake
We were the housing and the housed,
meaning nothing except that
we were always occupied,
or to put it simply never out.
Kate Bonfield
Coming home to days of heat
trapped beyond the door, to time skewed
by time away, the house bigger and
smaller than before.
Precious Ejim
I don’t know why I look to my mother
for her shadow never stays.
Jackson
I want to tell my mother,
I made a successful loaf
in the bread machine you didn’t know
you were leaving me
Kath Mckay
How to become two-dimensional
Die. You’re soon reduced to a photograph.
Lugubrious Co-op undertakers will zip you in a bag
and keep you cold . . .
Cindy Botha
atlas bear
black-footed ferret
cape lion