Today’s choice
Previous poems
Robin Vaughan-Williams
Does anybody want any money?
I’ve got all this money lying around.
Have you got anything you can do with it?
I asked Josie but she doesn’t want it.
Klio says the extension is already paid for.
Geoff has a job and wants to pay his way.
Craig says he wouldn’t take blood diamonds
so why would he take my money.
Sangita thinks our family may have benefitted from slavery
and ought to make repararations.
Jim says he could screw it up for stuffing the money cushions
in his Hidden Comforts exhibition. But he wouldn’t spend it.
Jemma would stuff it up her nose.
Lyra is trying to live without money altogether.
Troy says it’s too much. Aisha says it’s not enough.
Not enough for a deposit. Not enough to live off.
Enough to blow but not enough to make up for lost benefits.
I gave it to Pati but they gave it back with interest.
Now Craig thinks I’m a moneylender
and Lyra is tearing the curtains in the temple.Alex doesn’t have any plans.
Alex doesn’t have any plans. She doesn’t know what she’d do with
it. I might give it to her anyway. Everything tastes better with
money.
Robin Vaughan-Williams (Instagram: @robinrvw) is the author of The Manager and How to Fix a Human. He runs collaborative poetry improvisation workshops and his poems have appeared in places like Anthropocene, Dream Catcher, Under the Radar, and Obsessed with Pipework.
Trelawney
Religious Tack When you turned to God I turned away and in some sort of protest, a double-edged olive branch, I started a collection. Small at first: statues from catholic shrines, rude pewter pilgrims’ badges light-up Madonnas. A dome of the rock...
Molly Wolfe
Daddy’s Issues It’s Monday and screwed-up bits of paper hit her like rocks and bruise her inside and her wine (he said was his) paints the walls and burns like acid, droplets streaming ravines down her cheeks and a demon screams get out of my...
Geoff Sawers
Cage the ocean in a room sloshing against the walls a bee in your closed fist feel the fury of her tiny heart a mouth in a cage forced to speak a second language a rope of sand spun on a wide bleak strand press your ear to the cold wet ground hear...
Rosie Miles after Gillian Lever
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Grant Tarbard
Giblet after Claudia Emerson’s on leaving my body to science Pack the forests away in this dyed night, I won’t need them anymore, hair of thin cigarette smoke, trunk of posed opium. I is a liminal state....
Susie Wild
The Liminal Hours A chase of messages illuminates my screen through the small hours. Did I just see you? I’m sure I glimpsed you dancing, that green dress, the way you tilt your head to admire the view. These banshee hauntings my poor abandoned...
Myriam San Marco
The Cure I knew what my poison was I drank to more than enough I drank like drinking would give answers to questions I haven’t asked yet I built a cage out of the pieces of my bad self binding steel plate to hollow bones fusing old scars to fresh...
Jennie Byrne
Mute like attracts want – want ignites desire I wake up and my entire life has passed - I’m old and frail, limbs rigid, my breath appears in small puffs they’ve already chosen my gravestone, a chunk of fieldstone – small but quaint except it bore...
Kat Holmes
“GOTHS AREN’T BLACK” BUT YOU’D STARE ANYWAY, AND I CAN SMOKE TREE BOP ON THE CORNER TO BLACK METAL OR BASHMENT, IN PLATFORM BOOTS OR NIKE BLAZERS BECAUSE I AM STILL THE ONLY SPECTACLE IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD. IT IS BRAIDS KNOTTED INTO NOOSES,...