Today’s choice
Previous poems
Hélène Demetriades
By the Horns
At breakfast my man sticks a purple
magnolia bud in my soft boiled egg.
The flower opens, distilling to lilac.
On my autumn birthday he wrings
the necks of seven swallow-wings
to gift me the witch’s butter
wobbling like an orange nebula
above their nest –
Beyond the forest a doeling wire-snags
on the wrong side of the fence
tryingtosucklefrom nanny’s bulging udder.
Billy paws the turf, aiming his horns
at me like drop handlebars.
Hélène Demetriades has been longlisted in The National, 2023, and highly commended in the International Fool for Chapbook Award, 2023 & 24. Her debut collection The Plumb Line was published by Hedgehog Press in 2022. She won The Silver Wyvern, 2022, and has poems forthcoming in Magma and The Interpreter’s House. www.helenedemetriadespoetry.
Melanie Tibbs
People came to find out what ‘Garage Sale’ meant
in a small village landlocked county early burning comet tail
of Thatcher’s Britain.
Alfie Nawaid
a cowboy is that split second of doubt between victim
and victor, quick whipcrack out the corner of the mouth,
Stuart Rawlinson
I’m nineteen, I’m ancient.
I am so hungover
one of my eyes has fallen out…
Susie Wilson
Ceilings don’t hold water well.
Burst a pipe at the top
of an apartment block
to test this theory, if you will.
Andy Breckenridge
Abertawe After Richard Siken For CHD Tell me about the time I mansplained that Swansea is the English for Abertawe and means town at the mouth of the River Tawe. And about when, from the hill above Rhossili beach Lundy Island’s spectral mass...
Mark Wyatt
Daedalus
Plato loved his incessant questioning
of the natural world’s engineering
Sue Wallace-Shaddad
I tempt you with morsels
of soft-skinned peach, a pear sliced
in quarters, pipless and skinless.
Lesley Burt
Red-hot-pokers blazon her two world wars in flowerbeds, and in her hearth. The coalman drops odd nuggets under gaslight for neighbours to fetch in a bucket.
From the Archives: Dipo Baruwa-Etti
Seats
Before a table of white
People, I stand with ballet
Slippers strapped/soft soles
Head pointed towards the angels…