Today’s choice
Previous poems
Alison Patrick
Cepaea nemoralis
A dozen snail shells exposed on dry soil
in the archangel’s cut brown stalks.
Banded like fairground sweets and helter-skelters,
but forget all those frivolous stripey things.
These are brittle, open-mouthed vacancies,
void of the electric currents which pulse calcium
into place, push, make space, turn right,
turn right, turn right around, into pearl and protect,
drive the slow voracious trail for the sappy green and leaf of life
the vegetable reverberation of loam,
before the shiver-shadow
of frost and blackbird,
the shrug-shrink
in and around,
and around.
And seal.
And sleep.
Alison Patrick studied English at Leeds University in the last century and finally got around to writing poetry a few years ago. She lives in Shropshire and works in a shop. She has been published by Proletarian Poetry, Popshot and Spelt.
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On flat plains of low juniper scrub
monolithic, massive remnants of ice
dwarf the land, draws the herds: mammoth, deer, horse
Gordon Vells
Not the boring twin.
Not even benign.
This is a proper island:
rocks, foghorn, lighthouse.
Jacob Burgess Rollo
Jacob Burgess Rollo is a poet and prose writer based in Dorset, his work is featured in From the Lighthouse and Avant Cardigan, a zine he founded with friends. He has an English Literature BA from Durham and is going on to study for a master's in...
Dilys Wyndham Thomas
we walk through the exhibition hall lost
amongst water-logged bones, a sunk haul lost
Ruth Lexton
It is late at night and the kettle is boiling,
a quire of steam fanning out in the white kitchen
you are holding me as if I were your girl again
Stewart Carswell
It’s the house at the end.
White paint flakes off the front gate,
wood rots beneath.