Today’s choice

Previous poems

Abegail Morley

 

 

 

Houseplant daughter
(Non-melancholic depression)
Tonight, my houseplant child asks about sunlight,
brushes my arm as she stutters on the word,
photosynthesis, raises her eyes to the bulb as if to say,
Will that do? I keep the curtains shut all day now.
Everything in the room is artificial: light, tree,
At noon my houseplant daughter converts
carbon dioxide into sugar, and I carry on telling her
about things artificial, colour, I say,
and mime stirring a cake, and hearts,
they can be artificial too. Houseplant daughter
looks sad. So, she says, hearts aren’t real?
They are, I say, but sometimes flowers aren’t.
Houseplant daughter gasps, tugs my sleeve, eyes wet:
she’s spent three whole months waiting to bloom.
I Google life without light, learn all life needs energy.
I can hardly get out of bed. Houseplant asks for water.

 

 

Abegail Morley‘s debut collection was shortlisted for the Forward Prize. Her most recent collections are published by the wonderful Nine Arches Press.

Magnus McDowall

We rolled out on Seven Sisters Road,
two crates of Tyskie empty in my stairwell.

We were talking from the chest, walking backwards
crackling air above our heads like streetlights

Sarah Boyd

He’s a house of cards, a delicately balanced pyramid
held together by hearing aids and dusty bifocals and
wobbling dentures and ageing pacemaker and
shirt with three buttons missing in action and

Samantha Carr

You became obsessed with nucleated red blood cells when you peeked through an
aperture window at your liquid, viscous nature. You became obsessed with maps

Helen Akers

we’re trying to construct a frame for this
‘highly reactive impulsive emotion’
the nurse is looking into it   

Jenny Robb

By the light of a wolf moon,
my father turns mad.
Anne whispers to a girl in the wind,
and a friend blows into my life.