Today’s choice
Previous poems
Kay Feneley
Office Workers Against Sewage
Some days I must immerse myself in the waters
These days are more than others
Monday 09.06 – a sewage overflow has activated
Some days on the shore silence as we change
snuggle mugs, pass biscuits around
Tuesday 15.01- a sewage overflow has activated
Some days the choppiness is fun
we bounce along together
Wednesday 11:17 – a sewage overflow has activated
These days should make me buoyant
give purpose, community, bread
Thursday 17.47 – a sewage overflow has activated
Some days the mist disguises, I float
undisturbed by particulates of shit
Friday 12:52 – a sewage overflow has activated
Some days the smell lingers, stomach turns
mid-morning start to shiver
Sunday 23.59 – a sewage overflow has activated
Some days I dread going in
These days are more than others
Kay Feneley lives and writes in London, mostly as a civil servant but also poetry making sense of life as a disabled, neurodiverse woman. She was shortlisted in the Bridport Poetry Prize and publication includes Black Iris and Wildfire Words.
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.
Pippa Little
a woman’s rage cannot raise the dead
but it may split stone like lightning
Abiodun Salako
a boy grows tired
of dying again and again.
i am building him a morgue
for Thanksgiving.