Today’s choice
Previous poems
Pat Edwards
Photo of a man lighting up in the snow
In the wrong shoes, no gloves,
his dark coat and hat are greyed with snow.
He is in white-out, stopped in his tracks,
dying for the comfort of a fag.
He makes a chalice around the flame,
hands becoming shield so he can light up.
The photo shortens him, shot from above,
looks down on his foolish habit.
We don’t learn anything more than this,
only catch him in the act, before grey ash falls
at his unprepared feet; before he draws
a little more on his white stick, coughs
contaminated out breaths into the cold air.
Maybe he casts the butt the way smokers do,
a party trick flick that sends what’s left to fall
like a rogue snowflake, dirtying the drifts.
Maybe he rubs his hands, blows stale swirls
between numb fingers, prepares his own cremation.
Pat Edwards is a writer, reviewer, and workshop leader from mid Wales. She hosts Verbatim open mic nights and curates Welshpool Poetry Festival. Pat has work published in magazines and anthologies, and in her three pamphlets.
Lance Lee
History Here vineyards spill beyond an autumn hill, each vineyards's grapeleaves a different red or gold, geometric as Cezanne, the arc of the sky a long blue neck by Mondrian. What if the earth breathes its seasons as though alive, for when...
Angela Howarth Martinot
Visit Now that I am here, it’s clear. What I wish for you, Lydia, is that you will be washed up naked and alone on the shore of the Phaiakian’s island, not in this white space with locked doors and that blank-eyed doctor armed with a pile of...
Tom Kelly
The Virgin Mary Is Crying I am thirteen and leaving our house as breath haws out my mouth. When I breathe in hard me nose burns. Hands are dead, fingers tender as if they have been burnt. Hunched shadows hit the work trail; they close gates...
Malcolm Carson
Winging It He loved his pigeons, almost as much as serving his Lord. He would attend to them when his other flock were grazing on life. He’d gurgle along in the loft, ministering to their needs before the race. Setting the clock as they were sent...
Caroline Maldonado
Wax doll From a surfeit of dark you’re wax-cold at the basement window while through the back of the house light filters down the corridor and beyond there’s the garden with banana and bougainvillea and a child under the palm leaves holding out a...
Vankshita Mishra
eden does my world scatter and sprout possibilities every time I take a step? I choose a sapling – it flourishes and flowers, pollinates and I pluck we tumble through the cycles selecting seed after seed I’m trapped in the circle leading from...
David Van-Cauter
Tip In the evening light at the freezing tip we lug bin bags from the blanket of the car in masked anonymity through tired hi-viz employees, mumbling advice to pallid human figures, barely there, excising months of lockdown trash. I find a working...
Sarah Harrison Reid
blackhouse when I squat down by a stone wall the moment enters windless broken arms around me naked to the sky filled with a hearth of tree a machair rug when I lose all sense of others as far as the sea and then some slip down a funnel become...
Sarah James
Floundering March 1897, a rough winter turns rougher. A mast-gnashing southwesterly disrupts the balance between sea and air. The horizon swirls, then vanishes. Gale-force surges churn up 30ft waves, haul chaos in their wake. Surf froths like the...