Today’s choice

Previous poems

Sally Spiers

 

 

 

Windless Day

Night’s white noise is over. Day arises
to stillness. Light crouches behind windows,

presses through chinks. Dawn’s chorus
conceals a speck of silence that casts a shadow

stretching vast across the floor.
Double-checking in the cereal bowls, Day reveals

emptiness disguised as a cornflake. A stale
sandwich left overnight curls at the edges.

Day crawls like a hangover along city roads,
behind mountains, trawls the dark mirror of landfill

and finds her reflection no longer ripples.
Wind has grown up and moved away,

packing every half-decent breeze and musty blow.
As if the last breath of night has stranded her high

on a cliff face. A forgotten guillemot jumpling
sits on a ledge. No-one left to encourage its leap.

 

 

Sally Spiers is retired and lives in North London. She has had poems published by the International Times, Artemesia, Brighton and Hove poetry competition, South Downs Poetry Competition and Wild Fire. She won first prize in the Charm Poetry competition 2024. She is an active member of the Peace movement and organises a London wide poetry study group.

D. Parker

        D. Parker spends most of her days surrounded by books both at work and at home. In her free time she reads and occasionally lets words form on paper.    

Lydia Harris

      weather forecast for the funeral   there is a chance of deer grazing of mica rising in stone of knee deep sphagnum of two blank pages there is a chance of roses of lips being sealed of starling clouds yielding of a gurgle in the ditch of snipe...

Anna Maria Mickiewicz

      The state of war For Ukraine Storm. Broken spruces like matches In the Estonian forest. Spruces or pines? Broken our souls, Those, who did pass across, will not understand… Those, who did not pass across, will not understand As well    ...

Sam J Grudgings

      The birds are spies, they report to the trees   The birds don’t grant the day without sacrifice. We feed them gold bullion in place of corn. We are starving. We gift them an audience to our momentary. Tomorrow has gone, so we offer air burials as...

Ilse Pedler

      Jed of the Dodgems My brother said you can’t make a mountain out of a sow’s arse and at sixteen he ran away to join the fair; changed his name from Gordon to Jed of the Dodgems, grew his hair, slicked it back with Brylcreem perfected the art of...

Melanie Branton

      my brilliant boyfriend told me you’re not very intelligent, you only got good grades because you’re a conformist that’s the text we had to learn, boys are vowels girls are consonants, boundaries, sheepdogs, only there to hold the vowels together,...

Kenneth Pobo

      Mrs. Panterluck says she doesn’t know why she keeps dis- appearing.  One minute she’s in a mall walking over to a perfume kiosk and the next she’s gone.  It’s like she misplaces her skin.  Wherever she is, she retains a brain, though Mr....

Ruth Aylett

      Graphic Designs He arrives in a pixellated taxi so low-res he could be any of the men who’d tried to resize her round the axis of their doubts. Her fractal word within a word within a word, too small for her own resolution, plinks into the glass...

Caleb Parkin

      Queertopia (Working Title) i dreamt it once     but i dream a lot of things     not all of them printable     but this was some kind of culty shit well      no        the good bits of a cult     if you can say cults have    redeeming features i...