Today’s choice
Previous poems
Kathy Pimlott
Going down to do lights and curtains to fool any burglars
Twilight: one after another security lights click on
illuminating pathways, steps, empty front lawns,
triggered by my benign progress, then, disappointed,
click off. The sky is a layer cake of contrails, pink
shepherds’ delight and darkness holding a waxing moon
two days short of being Wolf.
All done, street lamps
cast my long shadow so it circles me as 1 walk back.
It grows and shrinks, scales walls. Sensing something
behind me, I stop, turn. There she stands, fox-smart
from nose tip to tail. I wait. She does too. I don’t run.
I say, ‘Off you go. This is my life not a Lawrence novella’.
Frost sets the road crackling as robins shout the night in.
Kathy Pimlott has a collection, the small manoeuvres, with Verve Poetry Press (2022) and three pamphlets with The Emma Press –Elastic Glue and Goose Fair Night and most recently After the Rites and Sandwiches (2024). www.kathypimlott.co.uk
Sylvie Jane Lewis
Being quiet and easily tired by being alive among people, I take
the cowardly route to community. I curate a digital garden of oddity.
At best my phone is a menagerie of queers: trinket makers, amateur
playwrights, witches, and, over and over again, my own personal monarchy.
Maryam Alsaeid
Maybe after your bath—
you will sit for a moment,
the towel will hold you close
like a quiet prayer—
Steve Komarnyckyj, Anna Bowles and Lynnda Wardle for Holocaust Memorial Day
where I saw you praying through the angle of the door
Now hangs only in my mind I breathe on its glass wipe away fly specks
Annie Wright
Sing silver times, shimmering columns
of light on the wine-dark, temple
to moon-eyed Hecate, the insatiable.
Magnus McDowall
We rolled out on Seven Sisters Road,
two crates of Tyskie empty in my stairwell.
We were talking from the chest, walking backwards
crackling air above our heads like streetlights
Yucheng Tao
But look here, I turned my head
and discovered the Denver Museum
waiting,
nerve, a soft-boned
species hums
Sarah Boyd
He’s a house of cards, a delicately balanced pyramid
held together by hearing aids and dusty bifocals and
wobbling dentures and ageing pacemaker and
shirt with three buttons missing in action and
Samantha Carr
You became obsessed with nucleated red blood cells when you peeked through an
aperture window at your liquid, viscous nature. You became obsessed with maps
Helen Akers
we’re trying to construct a frame for this
‘highly reactive impulsive emotion’
the nurse is looking into it