Today’s choice
Previous poems
Gabrielle Meadows
You always ate oranges
I am peeling an orange at the end of something
At the end of a line from each time you took up the fruit
Dug your thumb in, hooked out a chunk of skin
Pulled pith from flesh from round
heralding its colours so loud no one
could hear themselves think
I am tearing the peel from an orange gently and somewhere
Far away a tree falls in a forest and we
don’t hear it but the ground does and the birds do
And they mourn the passing of things out of existence
In limitless waves of quiet
Gabrielle Meadows lives in Norfolk and works in arts education. She runs workshops in
storytelling and improvisation for young children.
gjmeadows.wordpress.com
Lucy Calder
I arrange my books in order of height,
on a bank of cow parsley,
amid the random oscillations
of a cool breeze
Tanya Joseph
I know others blossom
but I vomit ectoplasm,
and squaring the corners of my bed,
the nurse reminds me I’m not dying.
Lucy Heuschen
It is known: a woman like that
brings evil on board.
Carolyn Oulton
Heat on the window
baking my face like a biscuit.
I move some hair, look over
at moss and narcissi, in a pot –
Jennifer A. McGowan
You have buried your mother and put
a memorial bench on a high hillside where
the wind blows sunsets straight through
and it’s always better to wear something warm.
Matt Bryden
You used to wind yourself in curtain turning taut,
look down at your feet, pirouette
as the fabric hugged you in.
James Coghill
the undershrub, shored up,
stakes its waspish claim,
its hereabouts
Peter Bickerton
The gull
on the meadow
taps her little yellow feet
like a shovel-snouted lizard
dancing on a floor of lava
Lydia Harris
ask this place
ask the silver day
the steady horizon
the self-heal the buttercup
the hard fern in the ditch
ask the bee and the tormentil