Today’s choice
Previous poems
Sally Jenkins
The Biology Department
Funny how Year 8 is doing bones
now, of all the weeks. In the prep room
we strip flesh off chicken wings,
steep the bones in acid til they bend
like rubber, and the girls shriek.
Cardboard femur and tibia
jointed with split pins swing,
and I sing while I work: the toe bone
connected to the foot bone,
now hear the word of the Lord.
I carry the skeleton in my arms
from Art back home to Science.
We sway like Fred and Ginger,
my fingers falling between its ribs
makes me weep.
I carried your crushed weight home
Mum, in a paper bag ribboned like a gift.
Tucked you under my bed to sleep.
Sally Jenkins is currently studying for the MA in Poetry Writing at The Poetry School, London. This is her first publication.
Hannah Ward
Look, Drew, the
plums are in
pieces beneath
us. I dreamt:
Andrea Small
a flower is not a heron
does not stand on one leg
spear-billed over golden carp
Usha Kishore
At dawn and dusk, my father
becomes a chant, that flies above
the courtyard of the old house
Jane Frank
The leaves are a colour you’ve never seen
but that I will learn to expect
and there’s a fracas-induced full moon
Clara Howell
The way a halved peach breathes, then rots
from the inside out.
Luigi Coppola
Out of ten bars, by the fifth, half of us had flickered
out and by this ninth one, it ended up just him
and me. A matchstick balanced on a stool, he sat
Jon Wesick
Loaded with hawks’ cries and horses’ huffs
Ennio Morricone’s score wails
Paula R. Hilton
When the genie appears, I’m in a frivolous
mood. First request? My mom’s apple pie.
Alice Huntley
slack in a bag from the freezer aisle
shaken out like shrunken grey memes
I long for the podding of beans