Today’s choice
Previous poems
Mary McQueen
Jigsaw
It starts in utero, painted wood carvings thick as a
finger, gift
wrapped in nostalgia. Colour weaves in time, a voice
with a
thousand faces. Some velcro themselves, urchins of
experience.
Some are stolen. Onlookers swapping their gray clouds
for your
sequinned linings. Habit seeks connection The way
red cars
appear everywhere. Paper craft punches squeezed
into a rat
shaped hole. Then, one day, you sit in a room, blood
staining
the clinical white, listening to a doctor tell you, again,
there is
no heartbeat. And after the third – because starts middles
and ends
must always come in threes – a tidal flow washes away
the picture
along with the list of names collected in notebooks and
stayed chimes
ring from my pores
like sopranos
Mary McQueen is a London born mixed heritage writer. In 2023 she released a spoken word album titled, Mightier than the Sword. In 2024 she was accepted onto the Out-Spoken academy. Mary is a psychotherapist, founded poetry platform Poetics and hosts a radio show @kilhapoetry
Clare Crossman reviews ‘The Shadow Factory’ by Deborah Harvey
The title of this collection is taken from a poem with that name in the book. Was it night fall or the sun eloping with a cloud? No one knew for sure but whatever the cause the shadow factory vanished. The poem in its entirety is about the demolition and...
Konstantina Sozou-Kyrkou
Chemical Elements and Waste They’re playing card games in the garden. Whenever I shuffle the card pack or sniff their coffee, or shift their keys, they get furious. ‘You have no place here, Spotty’, they point a finger at me. ‘Keep out of the way....
Aidan Casey
Taxi i need t hustle i need t score i need a drink & then a few more i need a hand t get t my feet i need an elbow t cross th street i need a hug baby i need a kiss i need t skip th preliminaries i need a proxy an adult toy i need a girl...
Annie Wright
Night Owl In the worrisome hours before dawn you’d be up quartering the house for silent chores. Never an easy relationship, you’d send letters or cards I treasured. Four-thirty, I’ve just finished ironing. You hated fluorescent tubes, preferred...
Robert Etty
The Bones Since no one’s left to pad out the story, these are the bones of it: Saturday evening, an RAF base (south Yorkshire, most likely), the last weeks of World War Two. The lads fix to meet at a hotel in town – they might not be here next...
Joanna Nissel
Eagle After Kathryn O’ Driscoll Wasn’t my heart a finch bird? Wasn’t it the yellow-joy chirp overheard on the dawn walk to work –a reminder of the things in this life that are delicate and made of more than the hollow-boned expanses between their...
Maxine Rose Munro
On the edge of the Arctic If the light were to leave our world, what of it? We would gather with fire under sturdy roof. We would share spirits and stories, songs, laughter. We would sleep soft in warmth of ourselves. If the light stuck up above,...
Rachael Clyne
Full Sail She feels like a ship in a bottle, its sails pulled erect, through its neck by a man with a string. He sighs with pleasure, as he seals it with a cork. Placing her on an ornate shelf, he can keep an eye on her, admire her graceful lines....
Ron Egatz, Matthew Caley, zoom reading . . .
Join us for a live zoom reading from Ron Egatz and Matthew Caley in our new occasional 'Live from the Butchery' series, hosted by Helen Ivory and Martin Figura from their home. The reading will take place on Sunday 26th July, 4pm GMT, 11am EDT. (Email Kate at...
