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.
Rakaya Fetuga
Winter Blossom Does your laughter feel like winter blossom? A fog of petals in your lungs, forcing joy a season too soon. I don't know the taste of your grief. Maybe it is a damaged earth, the world offbeat and threatening. But in this spring...
Eljae
and we sing 'this place ain't for you anymore, anymore even air moves different from before, from before' *humming* my work aunt once told me about this crowd that arrived. took homes and changed streets left people; moved people. she...
Lalah-Simone Springer
Apex Black woman, apex Thighs and mind of thunder Grounded, solid Catches me in her stratospheric eyeline in the future sight of higher love. The mountainous everything of her So bright I can barely behold. I hide in the shade of her lashes...
Jamal Hassan
Martin Luther King Jr's on tour in the UK to repeat the same speech, you've heard but never remembered word for word. And why should you? I have a dream is painted onto enough t-shirts and baseball caps for you to get the gist. School timetables...
Jemilea Wisdom-Baako
It didn’t make me a woman darkened school skirt pleats the pungent smell of loss this initiation a twelve year olds guide to becoming ashamed it didn’t make me weak they...
Zelda Cahill-Patten
Street-preacher She looks at me with that fearsome oil-sheen in her eyes, the weighty conviction of milk-heavy gaze and breasts, telling me (the spittle-flecked words like Words made flesh) of her Father, how he is unseen, felt unstirring in the...
Maeve McKenna
Dream State Covers tight as clingfilm. Tell them you fell headfirst, steadied yourself, sucked out what was left in your throat, coughed that creamy polyethylene onto the pillow. Eyeballs infused with miniature blue irises plunge into the well....
Abigail Elizabeth Ottley
Widows Walk Evenings she puts on her second-best hat skewered with a tortoise shell pin, buttons up her heart in a mauve mohair coat sallies forth to pick a bone with the moon. On the red-leaded step she scans the stars imagines them white sparks...
Guy Elston
You Call This Summer More like a chicken bone tossed to a pigeon. More like a half-portion of peanut butter slicked in the jar we never throw out. I pedal through birds in Tommy Thompson, all strong enough to fly south soon – if I check the water...