Today’s choice
Previous poems
Miguel Cullen
In Remembrance of Stars Past
The pelican is so dovey, with her funny crème anglaise feathers with pink and her split-ended crest and mouth.
I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and see Pavarotti
singing Lacrimozart by Salieri.
In the park you had a dandelion flower under your chin
there was an ill pigeon that Jake caught in his hands
a nostalgia that day I just wanted to be free like a spore or see a planet which died 103 years ago
and think, jealous, that you are better
feeling things more, I guess I want proof that I’ve lived.
Miguel Cullen is a British-Argentine poet and journalist. He lives in London with his wife and daughter. Cullen grew up travelling from Buenos Aires, the vast expanse of the Pampas, to south-west London and back again. He has published three collections of poetry, most recently In Dreams of Diminished Responsibility. Miguel’s work has been published in, among other places, Magma, Dreich, and Stand. His books have been named “Book of the Year” in The Times Literary Supplement, and The London Standard.
Eryn McDonald
It is here that the day breaks apart
Like ice on frustrated frozen pond
Here in the grounds of Ashton Court
I wish to bury myself amongst the green
Gordan Struić
Outside,
the city slides by,
blurred lines
of glass and rain.
Stephen Keeler
The days were huge and kind
and sometimes after school
we’d buy a bag of broken biscuits
for the long walk home
across the heavy heat of afternoon
on lucky days she wouldn’t take
the pennies offered up in supplication
Joseph Blythe
I swear I felt the swirly patterned paper
rip from the walls of my childhood bedroom.
It was the same stained cream shade as my skin –
pockmarked, cut and scabbed, dry and peeling…..
Denise Bundred
Shadowed boats bereft of sail
absorb the surge and slap
constrained by a blue-grey chink
of mooring chains.
Rahma O. Jimoh
A bird skirts across the fence
& I rush to the window
to behold its flapping wings—
It’s been ages
since I last saw a bird.
Samuel A. Adeyemi
I can already hear the chorus of my tribe.
They want the ancient blade,
the guillotine that hovered
above my head like a halo of death.
Mofiyinfoluwa O.
when you
know that your time with someone has almost run out, that is what you do. you look for
tiny things buried in the sand so that you do not have to look at the huge broken thing
standing between you both.
Chris Emery
and if we walk to the same sea later
we’ll see something heaving up beside us:
caskets of grey, white-capped, barren and loose,
the way memories are.