Today’s choice
Previous poems
Tamara Evans
Return
Travel West. Submerge yourself
in the M4’s homeward drift.
Remember how
its nightly glow
bewitched the kid
at your bedroom window?
It looked like fire, didn’t it?
Exit at junction 34.
Drop into street view
Follow the lane
down past prickly fields
where swallows zip.
Remember those kids
pulling petals
from clover heads?
Sucking sugar
from each wet tip?
Close your bedroom door.
Listen for tawny owls
and the InterCity.
Watch pipistrelles twist
in the velvet night
like you used to.
As they always did.
You remember, don’t you?
You remember everything.
Tamara Evans’s poems have been published in Poetry Wales and in the Write Out Loud Milestones anthology, and selected to appear on buses in London and Brighton in Poetry on the Buses competitions. Find Tamara on bluesky, instagram.
Pen Kease
Visual Impairment for Rowan when you trace her lines brittle teeth cheek-bones you’ll remember your mother’s face know her by her footsteps when there is cacophony speak and sounds will become ordered new ride the water row and pull until you are ...
Emily Sharkey
The Watchmaker stomach stilted, harbour bound, sweet dreams, love – oh, these rain clouds swirl like tea leaves in an ink-stained sky hush now, a golden-toned man hums time’s tune like notes to a song like beats to a heart whilst time scatters its...
Heidi Slettedahl
Flowers and Baguettes Her shopping trolley thought she had the kind of life where flowers and baguettes would feature regularly. She was just shopping for detergent and descaler. She wanted to live up to this imagined life, even sometimes bought...
Tessa Foley
Assortment But he watched me eat the chocolate, One, two, three, four, cordial lime, he Sat while I settled on this bridal pebble, and then on the monopoly hat filled with chew, He was only a boy, who could unmould my thoughts just by waiting to...
Katy Mahon
LAUREL She keeps a vigil by lake Kournas each evening when the sun and moon are on an even keel, before their alignment shifts and tilts one upwards and the other into the arid ground. She lights a candle and recalls the chase as the flame quivers...
Dana Miller
High July A sunset walk in the high blue, one of those days that stretches so far you can’t believe the morning belongs to the afternoon, or that either could ever become a night. I would have been here sooner but I was busy cleaning up the mess...
Luke Palmer
Ian in the Student House Palmer Park Avenue, Reading, c.2003 I remember this entrance hall, long and painted darkly. There’s a cat, too, somewhere amongst the bins or out in the park across the road. The view from the bay window is not much...
Mark Czanik
Happen Yesterday the sea was at our shoulder but we couldn’t see it. Long after the fog had drifted over us Wolf Rock Lighthouse was still reminding us in its old fashioned, diaphragmatic way to take care of sudden precipices and overhangs, as...
Jennifer Lee Novotney
Prayer Shawl My friend handed me a handmade prayer shawl but the truth was I hadn’t prayed in a very long time. The garment was thickly knitted like something my grandmother would have made. I put it around my shoulders immediately feeling safer...