Today’s choice
Previous poems
Becky Cherriman
‘He opens his throat for the crow’
(Matthew Hedley Stoppard)
Down the chimney
at dawn – crow caw.
Wings of night retract.
What does it wake me to
as sky is hearthed by morning
and my home warms slow?
Its meaning in my gullet,
I learn the way of crow,
that anything can be a tool,
how to get drunk off ants,
raucous mid-air row,
the roads I must cross
to the wasteland. You are there
on the perimeter, tearing at the sap-sore tree.
Nesting is a togethering. It hurts.
We spread our greying feathers,
count the clouds
and call for the coming.
Becky Cherriman is a Leeds-based writer, educator and performer who enjoys creative collaborations. Her poetry has been published by Seren, Mslexia, The North, Moving Worlds and Bloodaxe, in her pamphlet Echolocation and collection Empires of Clay www.beckycherriman.com.
Annie Kissack
Bellissimo at the Garden Party Spiked second-cousin to a daisy, All the joy and twice the size. I like your pincushion roundness and the plump solar illusion at your centre while all around you clump ragged rays of deepest pink, close packed as a...
Zoe Ellsmore
Six weeks after I could taste it for weeks after the birth - the metal rust, wet earth, smell of the birth I bled mountains of glistening rubies so the walls of our house swelled with the birth I waited in bare blue hospital rooms to see if I was...
Philip Foster
She goes to Germany I go to Germany and spend time with Klaus but he doesn’t tell Sue. We sit outside and play cards, we take out old photographs. It’s the time of insects, like wasps, which persist and make me nervous. Picture his older sisters...
Paul Grant
Something Sometimes Waking up I remember Exactly nothing Forget who And what I am, Forget why And when I look out the window See a blue sky A few clouds Go about doing Little of much And it's good Great even But slowly Memory Starts to crawl over...
Manon Ceridwen James
Gethsemane You tell me that the Vicar had said that God wanted your child for his garden, as I sit making careful notes in your wife’s chair. I always sit in the chair of the deceased like a macabre party game, though the music never stops for me....
Chris Lee
New English Phrasebook My psychiatrist suffers from low self-esteem. I only cut my forearms on Saturdays. I have no friends, just followers. We offer a mindfulness approach to social status readjustment. Your kiss tastes of micro-plastics. We have...
Nairn Kennedy
First Proving A puffball lump of dough kneaded warm like flesh swells in the bowl, drugs our lungs with yeast, pops little bubbles to keep us hooked promises a feast of crust parcelling a whiteness that fluffs against our tongues, then trails a...
Sam Wilson Fletcher
Blue We roll up our trousers and wade into the city river, down a sloping bank of cool mud which soothes our cracked feet, the water now up to our waists, now over our heads, down into a valley of silt like the hull of a giant wrecked boat...
Hilaire
Nativity Play Wattle Park Primary School, 1969 I’m a koala in the play. I get to hide inside the papier mâché koala head Mum made. My ears are cotton wool. In here, it’s hot and smells of glue and newsprint. Eyes peek through two holes, the rest...