Today’s choice
Previous poems
Mark Carson
Last thing he does
he dithers round the kitchen, lifts his 12-string from her hook,
strikes a ringing rasgueado, the echo bouncing back
emphatic from the slate flags and off the marble table.
He opens up the draught and gives the creaking stove a riddle,
livens up its embers, then slings a heavy hodful.
He’ll keep watch while the flames ignite – allows himself a strum-through
of an old Tom Paxton number – it’s in G – a fraction low
he thinks, so he’ll modulate to A, then C, his larynx
warming up. The last thing on my mind…thought turns
to dream as he replaces her, pockets his pick and yawning
climbs the steps to sleep. The furnace, open and forgotten, burns
a glowing cherry-red past three in the morning.
Mark Carson likes to write different poems about different things on the shore of Morecambe Bay.
Beth Booth
To the Occupier I have been leaving ghosts in every house for six years, which makes six houses – seven if you count my temporary tenancy in your affection. Nine houses if you count the ones I lived in where I had no right to do so. Arguably...
Michael W. Thomas
Fullwoods End (Roseville, West Midlands) Subversion of a name: you may be led to picture foxglove strand and windmill sail. The proper truth’s one more ‘Dunroamin’ vale where, way ahead of snow, the trees play dead. A no-place, linking Bilston’s...
Matthew Friday
The Remote Controlled Car A prized possession of a toy-starved childhood: one of the first remote controlled cars, chrome still gleaming, Dan Dare curves, tucked up in time-capsule coffin from the 1950's. It appeared by accident, landing from...
Paul Connolly
Leaf On the new-mown playing field, summer-yellowed and ragged, but glistening in the autumn morning, a horse-dung gobbet amid the straw slithered grassily into his glance which focused uncertainties of glancing smoky as rainfall and caught in the...
Kathleen McPhilemy
One for sorrow St Valentine’s Day and now it is we who are falling one by one all around in spring sunshine is the glitter of a magpie’s eye he fixes me from his perch on the half-wrecked shed auguring this week’s sorrow fresh in black and white...
John Grey
The Non-Banjo Player If I had a father who was a virtuoso on the banjo, I’d be playing bluegrass now. But he died before he had a chance to teach me anything. So, instead, I learned from this dark hole in my life. Wrote poetry. Plunkety plunk...
Z. D. Dicks
Skunk I am a creature of urges that longs/ to sidle underside tail to nose/ press into you/ cup chin in my paws pierce sharp eyes through nuzzling my snout flat to merge/ our foreheads/ together/ as a bone heart/ I want to tilt your head/ run my...
Mark Ryan Smith
Fun in the Sun He found himself watching the sun on the wall. The sun on the wall. He remembered people saying that when he was young, meaning that whatever movement that happened to be taking place at that time was moving so terribly...
Helen Freeman
Angus anhinga in my hang-glider, my ambit, my angler, the lips’ full opposite. Hungus - two gulps. Sirloin tang for my hunger, stirling catch, my one choice. A stone thrown into a silent land, the arsenal of your arrival. The headlong clang of...