Today’s choice
Previous poems
Play, National Poetry Day: Heather Hughes, Laura Webb, Jude Brigley
Four-Leaf Clover
We searched so long for that clover.
Every time the sun shone we scoured
the fields and woods, running past
the children playing with skipping ropes
and hula hoops. Then you came to me
and said you found one. The tape
transparent as water. I said
you hadn’t found one, you made it.
You said it was better to make something
than to find it. I wasn’t sure – too scared
to touch the tape, temporary as a bandage.
Eventually someone found one in the playground
and dropped it when break ended.
Our fingers wrestled. The school bell
rang like a gong. Your red face and hands.
The fourth leaf lay severed in my hands.
Heather Hughes is an English teacher who lives in the Lake District. She has a BA and MA in Literary Studies with Creative Writing from Lancaster University. She won the Foyle Young Poets of the Year award in 2019, and her poems have been published in Obsessed with Pipework, Flash, Dreamcatcher, and on Acumen’s young poets page. She writes a range of fiction and poetry and is currently working on a dark fairytale poetry collection about the female body.
Midsummers
pink plastic buckets
they try to lift the sun
from a rockpool
*
first kiss
behind the old lighthouse
burnt cheeks turn redder
*
after the rave
grains of sand in held hands
pulsing dawn
Laura Webb is a resident doctor near Brighton, UK, whose work explores themes of illness and healing, folklore and ecology. She co-edits the science poetry journal Consilience and is studying towards an MA at the Poetry School/Newcastle University.
Jude Brigley is Welsh. She has been a teacher, an editor and performance poet. She now writes more for the page. She is in her third age and is a woman in a hurry which is exemplified by having over twenty poems published this year. Publications in magazines include ‘Gyroscope’, “Alchemy Spoon’ and ‘High windows’.
Mark A. Murphy
If You / Then We If you are leaving Mohr and Mohme for Brighton then we are iron and steam and if you are walking alone at night then we are moon and Dog Star and if you are suffering with first-night nerves then we are Hamlet and Ophelia and if...
Julian Brasington
Home to the Hebrides Where are you running to what are you looking for rooting in other people’s abandonments scraping time off the earth into spoil for stone some sign of burning a flicker of bone someone’s life to ponder their gut to digest...
Joseph Cooper
medusa the narcissist self-preservation is really something ongoing and terminal they loved taxes they loved death certain things create an emotional reaction self-contemplation is coldly detached apparently the inevitable end of introspection led...
Finola Scott
Tell me again in this ragged midnight that intimacy will endure waters aren't rising and tomorrow the fritillary butterfly will graze my garden tell me that passion is not merely nocturnal but a tsunami of connection no stormy tea-cup but the...
Gary Jude
Birds Everyone held a bird, except you. A policeman eyed you suspiciously. You followed the crowd into the square. When the clock struck noon, everyone lifted their bird aloft. Some snapped necks and wings, or let their bird fly. A wife watched...
Fiona Theokritoff
Smickling I am as useless as a coronet, have lost a shoal of bloodied runts. Who shall assist me? Perhaps a ripe and red-faced peasant with more brats than she can raise. I need her shoes, I need a charm to stick what quickens to its cage. Perhaps...
Mark Valentine
The Road to Chalvington at Dusk Cast out from Eden he journeyed along the roads of dog-rose in the cloaky overcoat of good tweed and lit a cigarette cupped against the wind so that his fingers glowed and took that first best draught of it and...
Alan Dunnett
Descent Into Hades In order to discover what took place, I eventually made a descent by slow ratcheting, hard and easy, caught at last by the moment despite warnings and my own considerations. Your face appears before me and your will, unbent at...
Padrika Tarrant on National Flash Fiction day
An Escape In the back room’s desiccated atmosphere, the spiders stole one another’s shoes and sang their clever songs with their elbows folded. The shelf of hats stood to stiff attention, three coal black and a female in splendid blue that came...