Today’s choice
Previous poems
Alice Huntley
The tenderness of beans
slack in a bag from the freezer aisle
shaken out like shrunken grey memes
I long for the podding of beans
to run my thumbnail once more
down the dark seam of your housing
over broad lumps and bumps
that split open to fuzzy white lining
where you lie like silent siblings
waiting to be held and counted:
six, seven, and sometimes a baby eighth
I used to wish I could zip up the pod,
put you all back where you began
nestled in darkness – but then
I’d miss the ritual unclothing:
hot blanch of kettle water
sharp squeeze at one end
as each inward green – so bright and tender –
leaps from my fingers with a squirt
leaving odd empty pouches
and a little seal at the end like
two lips pursed in kindness
Alice Huntley is an estuary girl, born by the Humber and living by the Thames. She has an MA in Chinese Studies and writes & reads with local poetry groups in Richmond and Twickenham. Her work deals with memory and the body and has appeared in Mslexia, the Waxed Lemon and Ink Sweat & Tears.
Stephen Chappell
If you could call that friend,
the special one,
the one you always love and know loves you
Marius Grose
Until the dead, sucked from leaf mould graves
are rising in forest sap, to make connections
inside strange green brains
Andrew Keyman
a day later you’re in l.a. picking out cars with the magic
only money can buy
Chrissy Banks
So many times I walked
head down half asleep
along that ordinary road to school
Christopher M James
She’d had the two of us, had learnt
how children bury their riddles, how love
unearths them
Opeyemi Oluwayomi
They are piercing knife between
the city, detaching the body from the head,
& squeezing the blood out of the flesh,
so there can be an end to what hasn’t begun.
Rhian Thomas
I sit to fumble some intrusion from my shoe.
A shard of stone, no bigger than a thought, its ridged face
cutting like some old lover, like a baby or
an old preacher drumming something that irks like a worn out song
Erwin Arroyo Pérez
Here, in my Manhattan room / insomnia tugs at me like a half-closed taxi door / letting all the echoes in
/ an ambulance carries the last breath of an asthmatic man
Hannah Linden
Formed into darkness
an octopus squeezes around
the spaces of a shipwreck.