Today’s choice
Previous poems
Peter Wallis
All House Holds
Dead in a chest,
are folded matinee jackets, bonnets, bootees and mitts.
Tissue sighs like the sea at Lowestoft,
always Third week in August
Once stuffed with baby breaths, the back bedroom
holds only a tallboy
with stashed school reports, ties without shirts,
blazers limp as puppets.
Hornby childhoods spilling like kapok,
the old home is a flickering of carriages.
Bikes, injured Bear-Bear, Mouse . . . first words
haunt one of these cupboards.
Mother’s remains are mothballed – lavender bags, frocks,
twin-sets with matching accoutrements.
Beside her bed, dead in a drawer, Dad’s
just a clinker of cufflinks and collar studs.
Peter Wallis has been a prize-winner in the National Poetry Competition and is author of Half Other (The Hippocrates Press, 2023) https://www.hippocrates-poetry.org/publications-by-hippocrates/p/half-other-by-peter-wallis He is also Submissions Editor for the UK charity Poems in the Waiting Room.
Winifred Mok, Sandra Noel, Özge Lena and Alannah Taylor for Earth Day
we groan as the mercury hikes
climbing with the ball of fire
the Hot Weather Warning surrenders its flag
feels like 40 and it’s only May Day
-Winifred Mok
where geese balance on one leg
sleeping inside themselves
until they wake for hours of sun
and swimming
-Sandra Noel
You are walking in a half empty street. Carrying a rifle, you are hunting for canned food. Sultry evening falls like an electrified blanket, leaving you breathless. The world you know is long gone. The world has already surrendered to the heat waves followed by water wars, hunger wars. And hunger is a crazy carnivore in your belly. You turn a corner to see two rifles. Pointed at you. You shoot the air calmly.
-Özge Lena
I might eat more slowly, breathe more deeply the fragrance of nettle steep, be more mindful of
the miracle of vegetables of promising colour glinting in the oil of a pan, I might grind my molars
with the thought close that their substance, too, is borrowed from the minerals of the ground
-Alannah Taylor
Cal O’Reilly
I feel the sun, its love and anger,
a baked red brick rubbed
on the back of my calves.
Hiking in a binder was a shit idea,
My lungs reach to surface, come short.
Lucy Dixcart
It Starts Before Birth
Your tadpole-self, displayed to strangers for a thumbs-up.
Then childhood illnesses, faithfully documented.
Anna Mindel Crawford
We have our eyes on the chairs, ready
for when the music stops. Nobody wants
to be in the space where a seat had been
Sue Proffitt
Sue Proffitt lives by the coast in South Devon, UK. She has an M.A. in Creative Writing and has been published in a number of magazines, anthologies and competitions. She has two poetry collections published: Open After Dark (Oversteps, 2017) and The Lock-Picker...
Daniel Rye
When did the slowness
of this afternoon
merge with the chugging
boat engine in the harbour?
Anna Ruddock
Let it be okay that it took me a while to get here
If not better then equally fine to be
the goldfinch . . .
Laura Fyfe
How do we pull ourselves back
when we’ve nothing to hold on to?
Find a way clear
or stay? Wait.
David Belcher
How to not exist
Allow yourself to be elbowed aside
become a non-person
an avoider of lingering looks