Today’s choice
Previous poems
Sally Festing
A Basket of Nettles and Larks
Life lines still arc round the base of each thumb
though the bulk of hand’s muscle mass
lies in the thenar bellies, now flat as linoleum
and tendons smart branches when I brace fingers,
interrupting hillocks of skin.
The heart line runs under my wedding ring,
fused to the engagement ring (one college afternoon).
If I massage the mudflats in this wicked pack of cards,
flies swarm its spiderwebs. But valiantly my head line tramps
through my palm’s basket of nettles and larks.
Sally Festing’s new poetry collection, Meeting Places (Mica Press), will be launched 22 May 2025 (6-8.00pm) at Norwich’s Maddermarket Bar. The poems wrap up love, blood ties, art, and aging in a spikey bundle. She’s a seasoned North Norfolk author (https://www.sallyfesting.info
Amirah Al Wassif
The God I know works as a baker in a local shop.
From time to time, I see him feeding the kittens bread crumbs soaked in milk.
Cliff McNish
Heaven For starters, the standard works everyone gets: three trumpets blown in unison; your name acclaimed to the galactic hegemony of stars; plus assorted angels with ceramically smooth hands (the nail-work!) casting wholesale quantities of petals (flowers of the...
Paul Stephenson
Rhubarb after Norman MacCaig And another thing: stop looking like embarrassed celery. It doesn’t suit. How can you stand there, glittery in pink, some of you rigid, some all over the shop? Deep down you’re marooned, a sour forest spilling out beneath a harmful canopy....
Holly Winter-Hughes
You stand behind me / catch my eye / take the snatch of silver
Laura McKee
after the accident the plaster
held her still
Melanie Branton
At boarding school, I had no idea what to do
with myself. Most of the time,
I hid myself in a paper bag . . .
Lucy Calder
I arrange my books in order of height,
on a bank of cow parsley,
amid the random oscillations
of a cool breeze
Tanya Joseph
I know others blossom
but I vomit ectoplasm,
and squaring the corners of my bed,
the nurse reminds me I’m not dying.
Lucy Heuschen
It is known: a woman like that
brings evil on board.