Today’s choice
Previous poems
Kate Bonfield
May long weekend
Coming home to days of heat
trapped beyond the door, to time skewed
by time away, the house bigger and
smaller than before.
As if magnified, a hornet lies dead
by the baffling window
ridiculously detailed and weightless
in the new breeze, shifting.
Another dies nearby, tightens
to a comma then straightens, repeating
on a Domino’s flyer I use to take it outside.
I doubt it survived there.
This happened another May:
emerging in the old, cold room
taken in by green seen through glass,
the house stuffed solid with the shut-up noise
of their oversized hopelessness.
Kate Bonfield lives and works in Dorset.
Play, for National Poetry Day: Gayathiri Kamalakanthan, Paul Stephenson, Jem Henderson
How two men can become
four men can become
eight men
Play, for National Poetry Day: Elena Brake, Karen Downs-Barton, John Mole, Eleanor Holmes
Take eight each of hex bolts
washers, locks…
it’s important
to fasten these tightly.
Jade Wright
Things have been rough lately.
It seems impossible now,
as the breeze relieves us
Ruth Lexton
The new year slouches forward, unlovable,
barely acknowledged but for tired, gritty eyes
and a muffled scream into the kitchen towel.
Claire Booker
Never has there been so much interest
in the humble tongue. It peek-a-boos from my mouth
like the little man in a weather clock.
Jacob Mckibbin
my brother saw his attacker
at a petrol station
Janet Hatherley
He’s ten years older than he’d said, which makes him
twenty-eight years older, not eighteen.
Syed Anas S
We are the ones
who see big crackers
burst every day—
Dharmavadana
She barely glances at you when you chink
your spare coins in her upturned cap, but still
spreads a spell among the pavement footfalls,