Today’s choice

Previous poems

Audrey Cotterell

 

 

 

A November anniversary

In a corner chapel of the abbey
I lit a small candle, and sent the flame
as a message only half composed
to somewhere I hardly believed in.

Room is restricted on the ferry:
six cars, a few pedestrians and dogs,
all of us looking across the water
at the estuary’s other bank coming closer.

Even if the river’s unwrinkled, the crossing smooth
and it doesn’t take too much waiting
to get to the opposite side
lighting a candle is never straightforward.

 

 

Audrey Cotterell lives in Sussex. Her work was long listed for the Winchester Poetry Prize in 2024, and has been published in London Grip.

Magnus McDowall

We rolled out on Seven Sisters Road,
two crates of Tyskie empty in my stairwell.

We were talking from the chest, walking backwards
crackling air above our heads like streetlights

Sarah Boyd

He’s a house of cards, a delicately balanced pyramid
held together by hearing aids and dusty bifocals and
wobbling dentures and ageing pacemaker and
shirt with three buttons missing in action and

Samantha Carr

You became obsessed with nucleated red blood cells when you peeked through an
aperture window at your liquid, viscous nature. You became obsessed with maps

Helen Akers

we’re trying to construct a frame for this
‘highly reactive impulsive emotion’
the nurse is looking into it   

Jenny Robb

By the light of a wolf moon,
my father turns mad.
Anne whispers to a girl in the wind,
and a friend blows into my life.