Today’s choice
Previous poems
Ruth Lexton
Watching, January 2021
The new year slouches forward, unlovable,
barely acknowledged but for tired, gritty eyes
and a muffled scream into the kitchen towel.
Pale moonlight streams through the blinds,
watching the night in shiftless wakeful patterns,
patience hardening into endurance as ache into milk.
There’s no forbearance from the Wolf’s Moon
brazenly hanging over rooftops at dawn, flaunting
her silver coin aureole amidst satellite dishes and high wires.
She filters the winter daylight with an ashen smile.
Oceans drag in her wake like the sweep
of a bridal train washing the slagheap of grime.
What happens when she is too jaded to renew the cycle?
What if she decides to finally shake off the tedium
of earthly responsibilities and fling herself up and away
into space, cackling madly, her bald skull shorn of its offices,
glorying in her solitary rampage as she rises up,
shadowless, in the counter-light of the stars?
Ruth Lexton is an English teacher and writer. Her poetry has appeared in Abridged, Shooter, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Drawn to the Light Press, The Alchemy Spoon and London Grip. She won second prize in the Hexham Poetry Competition 2023 and was longlisted for the Aurora Prize 2023.
Lucy Atkinson
Sunspot I watched her. Persephone. Sunflowers on her dungarees. Breathing in the blackened syrup. London air. She’s trying not to talk about it but she remembers. Winter. There’s Parsley on the windowsill. Planted in a little mug. The only spot in...
Stanley Wilkin
Appearance and Apparition He pirouetted into the room, the lonely dancer With moon-blown hair. Along the way he brushed the sea Gathering it up like dust. Each morning seated on my porch I welcomed his unseen arrival A coffee in one hand a smile...
Rachel Coventry
Clematis My mother loved wild things like clematis, she had respect for anything that disregarded perimeters, to hell with the neighbours and their territorial claims. Maybe that’s more me than her. Oh, you’re a brat she’d say like clematis; an...
John Grey
To a Father I Never Knew Go on, be mostly unexamined. Excuse yourself from history. Hang there on the periphery of consciousness. If you’re okay with that, then fine. But I rate you more important than you do yourself. And I’ll legitimize you...
Lydia Allison
Not Anywhere We did not rollerblade. We did not keep secrets. He was not still in love. I did not bring my telescope and did not know the names of stars. He did not pretend to like the sound of my book. We did not order these. The bones did not...
Sunyi Dean
Dust I have become my mother, always sweeping through the corners of our corners, her broom in search of imperfection to eviscerate. Life is so untidy, but she has found ways to be neat. She picks up all the scattered things left lying,...
Sam Hickford
Familiar Tissue "My father is given to me and I dissect his body. I study him carefully. You ask me where I learn anatomy?" - Stanislaw Szukalski As every sinew, tendon, lies apart I reflect that only, in these loving scrapes will he be at all...
Jenny Moroney
Part We didn't expect it to snow but look it falls in soft flakes. Alone now, we leave the cottage between white folds and aim at mountains. You walk ahead: a gap, I leave and over your footprints, I press my own. We follow the stream winter has...
Colin Pink
Lions in Translation We, at the International Lion Translation Centre, do not believe: If a lion could speak we would not understand him. Through our outreach programme our dedicated team of translators, at considerable personal risk, have found...