Today’s choice
Previous poems
B. Anne Adriaens
Fancy etymology for a vacant lot
The French term terrain vague enfolds
a plot of land I thought at first was vague,
undefined and malleable. As a noun,
this vague echoes on the edge of its meaning:
perhaps a patch of earth evoking a wave,
capable of conjuring the sea.
I’d picture the nettles, brambles,
dandelions and daisies swaying in the breeze
that precedes the first tide,
that would inch its way in from nowhere
to gently wet the grit and salt the rubble—
until the smell of brittle paper,
old ink and dust, rises from a dictionary:
this is an empty space, a new start. For rubbish
and weeds are matter too, however dismal and
dismissed. We can build a dream on rubble.
B. Anne Adriaens’ work has appeared in various publications, including Poetry Ireland Review, Abridged, Poetry Scotland, Stand Magazine and A New Ulster. Her pamphlet Haunt was highly commended in the Fool for Poetry Chapbook Competition 2024.
J.S. Dorothy
Find yourself by the lake,
its icy membrane split by the long
arrow of a skein, reflected
flurry of wings, cries
bawling.
Sarah Rowland Jones
The terns lift as one
from the salt-pools behind the beach
– a thick undulating line
Jean O’Brien
Winter soil is hard and hoar crusted,
birds peck with blunted beaks,
pushing up are the blind green pods
of what will soon be yellow daffodils,
given light and air.
Jean Atkin
We scoured the parish tip most weeks, when we were kids.
We clambered it in wellies. Ferals, we scavenged
in the debris of the adults’ lives.
Sally Festing
Life lines still arc round the base of each thumb
though the bulk of hand’s muscle mass
Joe Crocker
There was always, of course, the cold
– its freezing pretty fingerprints on our side of the pane.
Julie Sheridan
They married in a chapel of black steel
bars, tethered up their feathers to serve as
stained glass. . .
Maxine Sibihwana
here, water does not run. instead it
sits obediently in old plastic containers
Lesley Curwen
Her feet snagged in a cleverly-placed net
my sister waits for him to untangle her,
to hold her head still between thick fingers . . .