Today’s choice
Previous poems
Janet Hatherley
The night before their wedding, Dad tells Mum two things
I.
He’s ten years older than he’d said, which makes him
twenty-eight years older, not eighteen.
It’s a bad blow. What’s done can’t be undone. Mum’s only choice
is a hostel for unmarried mothers.
She puts on a brave face—
better than finding out at the registry office.
II.
He’s a Russian Jew, came to England when he was seven,
his family fleeing through the night in a horse-drawn carriage.
Mum’s intrigued, doesn’t know much about Jewish people
or Russia, imagines a trip on the Trans-Siberian Railway.
Years later, I discover escaping a pogrom in the Ukraine
is his father’s story.
Dad was born in Nottingham.
Janet Hatherley’s pamphlet, What Rita Tells Me, and collection, On the road to Cadianda, were published by Vole in 2022 and April 2024. She has poems in several magazines, including Under the Radar, Culture Matters, Ink Sweat & Tears. She won 2nd prize in Enfield competition, 2023 and was placed first in Vole anthology, 2024.
Jill Abram
Did Philippe Petit come to Heptonstall? At the top of the mill chimney some hundred feet above the stream, level with my eyes and my open mouth is a man in a leotard. It is purple, gleaming neon against lichen on stones to which he clings, brighter even than...
Susan Castillo Street
Witches Brooms and Winter Roses This year is nearly over. We walk arm in arm, hear the sound of sirens incessant background dirge. On our street, three cases. One next door, one across the way. Another, three doors down. No dead so far. Stubborn...
Hilary Menos
Collation It’s Izabelle’s funeral collation so we’re driving into Gaillac wearing proper clothes. I’m driving, you are listening to some mad YouTuber who claims that water has memory because if you say nice things to one tub of water and nasty...
Sam Hickford
A Willow-Tree in Hiroshima Softly & impossibly, her roots still beckon growth. It is a slow hope she is drawing. Their ends were swift - echoes in the floorboards. I am reliving it, since I am solitary. A thrawning suffocation grabs the sky so...
Julian Dobson
Wave We have learned to wave distantly through glowing windows glimpsing a well-placed bookcase or houseplant imagining the corners of a room their piled-up flotsam we have learned not to ask what happens at the watershed we observe flows ...
Sue Spiers
The Glow I recognise the tingle at my nape my face melts, oxters darken, make-up slides, instantly wet through layers meant to cope. Tissues, useless until the wave subsides, my bright red fan announces to the place the hormone flush that’s difficult to...
Elizabeth Gibson
The golden hare I colour in a hare for my Mam for her birthday, hop between radio channels and pencil shades: red to maroon, blue to indigo, brown to russet, softest gold for the hare and the glow around it. It is long in body and limb and ear,...
James Bradley
Anti-Aubade Your sobs disrupt the sound of Robert Lowell reading his ‘Old Flame’ from the app on my phone. I sit on the balcony finishing a final cigarette and try to enjoy it. Leaves crackle in the darkness just outside the panes. The orange ember...
Sally Michaelson on Holocaust Memorial Day
from The Lorch Family Magic Trick Adolf Althoff is used to riding tigers so when Gestapo soldiers come looking for Irene he plies them with Schnapps while Irene squeezes into a passage tight as a magician’s box – contracting in size until she is...