Today’s choice
Previous poems
Amanda Bell
Spindles
We clipped a window through the currant, sat on folding chairs with keep-cups,
wrapped in blankets as we yelled through the prescribed two-metre gap.
Then took to mending – darning socks and patching favourite denims,
exchanging threads in packets hung on one another’s gates,
and wondered could we find a way to tell our mums we loved them,
without intimating to them quite how frightened we’d become.
We progressed to park-bench coffees, spoke of pressures on our daughters
now cloistered in their bedrooms, online behind slammed doors;
compared damage to the woodwork and the problem of old hardware,
admitting it unlikely that we’d source replacement spindles –
the shift to metric from imperial lost something in translation,
and when the thread wears thin the grub screw fails to bite.
Amanda Bell is an award-winning writer whose books have been published by Doire Press, Fine Press Poetry, Onslaught Press, Alba Publishing and Wildflower Poetry Press. She is an assistant editor of The Haibun Journal. Repped by The Book Bureau. www.
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...
Elizabeth McGeown
Outpatient Take a half-shower Sit at the edge of the bath, feet wet Shower head unscrewed, hose lying flaccid in the bath Belching out lukewarm water over overgrown toenails Walk around the house bumping into things Giggle like a...
Phil Wood
Island Fiction I could murder a cuppa mutters a knitting voice, her claws purling patterns the Fair Isle way. The kettle whistles, the brew as warming as a jumper - outside gulls rock n' roll drunk on a burgundy sky. The winged ways gleam in those...
Gillie Robic
The Opposite of Pygmalion She’s breaching the limits climbing the scaffolding hauling herself up poles rolling over the lip of the kick-board. My hands race like a card sharp trying to confuse the eye not wanting to let her off the plinth. I don’t...
Brian China
Gift Dark from four, because of the rawness I buy plain chicken and some chocolate, turn back the way I’ve come to the pavement shrine of himself beside an alcove where drunks piss, fumble the sandwich handing it to him, “Here, have this.” One...
Louise Warren reviews ‘Daylight of Seagulls’ by Alice Allen
Alice Allen’s first collection Daylight of Seagulls takes the occupation of Jersey during WW2 as its subject, but she weaves so much more. In her vivid introduction she tells us that she grew up there in the 70’s and 80’s. ‘ we weren’t taught about the...