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.

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...

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.