Today’s choice
Previous poems
Gabrielle Meadows
On sunday morning you lay together laughing
She gets into your bed
like when she was little.
Flowers grow out of the wardrobe,
moss claims the windowsill
and a vine
snakes its way to the bed post,
climbing.
You are laughing.
Imagine she is bounding
from the garden,
skin laced with sweat.
Smells of pollen and soil.
Imagine you need to get up but don’t yet.
Five more minutes.
This is all there is
and all there ever is.
The moss claims the windowsill
and every inch of earth.
Gabrielle Meadows lives in Norfolk and works in arts education. She runs workshops in drama and improvisation. Previous publications in Ink, Sweat & Tears, Atrium Poetry and The Lake. @gabrielle_meadows
Martin Fisher
Inside, in the half-light, the iron rot took hold.
Forgotten service–obsolete.
Salt-coin neglect.
The money flowed inland,
Moored on an hourglass choke.
No one told the sea.
Craig Dobson
Out of morning
a misted light,
glowing fire
in the air.
Steven Taylor
A very long time ago
Stephen Fry’s godfather, the
Justice, Sir Oliver Popplewell
Who chaired the inquiry
Into the Bradford City
Amirah Al Wassif
Beneath my armpit lives a Sinbad the size of a thumb.
His imagination feeds through an umbilical cord tied to my womb.
Now and then, people hear him speaking through a giant microphone—
Singing,
Cracking jokes,
Mark Smith
In the portacabin that morning, men smoked
and looked at last week’s paper again.
There was no water to fill the urn.
The first job – to get connected
Toby Cotton
A blustery day –
the wind too strong for kites
or for lifts to the sky.
“To a thoughtful spot,” it cites
and pins me to the earth.
Ansuya Patel
except this burnt red vase.
Hand shaped in the muffled roar,
devouring flame in the furnace’s mouth.
Hannah Ward
Look, Drew, the
plums are in
pieces beneath
us. I dreamt:
Andrea Small
a flower is not a heron
does not stand on one leg
spear-billed over golden carp