We Play Rock-Paper-Scissors

Every evening at the care home, I pull in
two armchairs til they’re facing. Opposites,

we never fist bump, high-five or
touch each other’s vying outstretched fingers.

The dictionary says this ancient game
has many distant names. And I tell you

ro-sham-bo, jak-en-poy, bato-
bato-pik. And each and every time

as I stand to leave, you’ll say I can’t
because your feet have gone

walkabout, someone’s made off
with your outdoor shoes. And you’ll want

to take mine, try them on, but don’t
like the look of them, patent leather

never really your thing. And then,
you’ll lock your hands together, to make

the shape of a plea, or a prayer, say
you’ll try harder next time. Like once

way back, when it could have been
just us, or when the world began.

Oenone Thomas is a writer, child psychotherapist and chocolatemaker.  She is a Poetry School MA graduate. As poet in residence for the Cuckmere Pilgrim Path 2024/25, she has just published Self-Portrait as Scallop Shell.

Alignment

The art’s to discover what the world wants of you,
the way a player finds himself when he stops time,
running the perfect ball half a pitch length,
the magnetic goal’s net opening its heart
with the grace of a predestined thing,
the way sometimes words can fall into a poem’s line
as if they had always been there, or the top C sung
in cathedral acoustic making itself new each time,
the you and I of lovers happening together,
and colour an effort of matter to become light.

Seán Street’s most recent collection is Running Out of Time. (Shoestring Press) His latest prose is Wild Track: Sound, Text and the Idea of Birdsong (Bloomsbury, paperback edition in May 2025.)

Hopscotch After Rain

Chalk squares bloom on cracked pavement,
washed, then reborn by small hands.
Footsteps drum in bright dust:
one hop, two hops, balance kept

inside a geometry of chance.
Stones leap, arcs of small planets
carved in ordinary air.

We whisper counts under breath,
touch down, turn, and lift again,
gravity loosening like a knot.

For an instant, we hover
between chalk and sky,
believing the ground is optional.

David A. Lee is a physician and emerging poet born on a Sioux Indian reservation whose work explores memory, play, and the human spirit. His poems will be appearing in literary journals, and he draws on heritage and clinical insight to illuminate ordinary moments.