Today’s choice
Previous poems
Tess Jolly
Fish and Chips
When I went round the next day
with a bottle of wine, his wife said
he was bruised down both sides
from squeezing through
our upstairs bathroom window.
He’d been on his way to get more fish
from the freezer at the end of their garden
when he saw us next door:
you, not good with heights, stopped
around four rungs up,
and me, heavily pregnant, holding the base
and weakly cheering you on.
He jumped over the fence
and did what needs must,
no locksmith needed, and Josie,
still asleep in her cot, none the wiser,
though his customers must have wondered
what was taking so long –
Friday night and the queue spilling
along the street as he ascended –
until he appeared with a smile
and a How can I help?,
went back to the everyday work
of stirring flour and milk into gold.
Tess Jolly has published two collections, Intimate Architecture and Breakfast at the Origami Café, both with Blue Diode Press. She lives with her family on the south coast of the UK, where she runs her freelance editing business: www.poemsandproofs.co.uk.
Charlotte Holm, Jennifer A McGowan
A leaky drainpipe drips
creating damp patches on uneven paving,
slime green algae blossoms
forming viridescent ripples
James McDermott
if samsara’s concrete please don’t come back
as black jackal for I live in Norwich
nor spineless worm as I don’t have a lawn
Cheryl Snell, Alice Gregorio, Peter Lilly
I grew up on a farm so I should know all about expensive cows and free milk. You’re taking being a debutante much too literally. We only meant to give permission for you to make a good match, not flit among the suitable boys…
Jade Kleiner
There is the green that birthed all pine trees.
Tom Blake
We were the housing and the housed,
meaning nothing except that
we were always occupied,
or to put it simply never out.
Kate Bonfield
Coming home to days of heat
trapped beyond the door, to time skewed
by time away, the house bigger and
smaller than before.
Precious Ejim
I don’t know why I look to my mother
for her shadow never stays.
Jackson
I want to tell my mother,
I made a successful loaf
in the bread machine you didn’t know
you were leaving me
Kath Mckay
How to become two-dimensional
Die. You’re soon reduced to a photograph.
Lugubrious Co-op undertakers will zip you in a bag
and keep you cold . . .