Today’s choice
Previous poems
Ivan McGuinness
Bourn Identity
Begins
in a bubble
strained by chalk.
Where the brim-full hill cries,
weeping tracks merge
into an idea of brook:
Letcombe,
until merging with Ock.
Earth accommodates to accumulate,
hollows between course, force and resistance.
Pool falls over rock
riffles
into deeper ways,
cress-beds, crayfish, sticklebacks and bullheads.
Wet footed playground,
skirts tucked up
socks rolled on the bank,
ripple and eddy round skinny white legs,
soft silt cushions tender toes,
nets, jam-jars,
magnified beauties of the deep.
In town, domesticated by brick and stone, after grills and races,
a turning wheel catches life out of the stream, grinds free flow
into value.oMill-tailoooowateroooorelaxesooooafteroooowork.
Ivan McGuinness lives in Oxford, his poetry has appeared in several magazines including Seaside Gothic, The Alchemy Spoon and Dream Catcher.
Alan Hardy
Made a list.
A record.
The dishes she ate.
Monuments visited.
In Paris.
Susana Arrieta
Tempting death with every cobblestoned step
his face was a collection of broken records
Peter Leight
There’s more waste than we use for the things we ordinarily use waste for, such as piling it on barges and sending them out to sea, tucking it under the surface like a layer of insulation . . .
John Grey
there are some lives
lived poolside
and others that
mostly consist of
a bent back in a field –
Adam Flint
All summer automatic exits remain
open, and no one leaves or boards.
David Van-Cauter
You are pleased to see me
in my gothic T-shirt –
those bats, you say, have been your friends.
Mark Wyatt
yes of course/ it was idyllic, reclining (pint of/ cider in hand) poolside in the harvesting/ sunlight
Catherine Shonack
when confronted with vast, endlessness of the ocean
who wouldn’t go mad?
Ansuya Patel
Women scrape coins from their purse,
count pennies, one lifts up a watermelon
in mid-air like raising a newborn to light.