Today’s choice
Previous poems
Stephanie Feeney
Ode to Remission
My mother is here, and might not have been,
so I hold things tighter:
the small-getting-smaller of her
running with my daughter down the beach,
every conch and whelk they gather,
the scar tissue just peeking out
of her swimsuit, her phone number
the only one on Earth I know by heart,
the way she watches pelicans dive-bomb
for breakfast like it’s a show she’s got tickets for,
her expectations hovering everywhere –
without them, I’d be so awfully free.
My mother is here, and might not have been,
so we get up early and walk:
the soles of our feet on the shell-shard beach
hurting just the right amount.
We drink too many cocktails.
I let her kiss my curls the same as hers
like I’m still five. We build sandcastles
with my daughter, as far
from the claws of the tide as we can,
as deep-moated as we can,
as tall in their armor of shells as we can,
knowing we will wake to not even a trace of turret.
My mother is here, and might not have been,
so we do it all over again.
Stephanie Feeney was born in Louisiana and raised in Texas and now lives in Suffolk. IS&T was her very first publication in 2021 – a poem called ‘The Brief Invisibility of Fathers’. It will appear in her debut collection which is forthcoming with Broken Sleep Books.
Nelly Bryce
Longing curls its legs up on the sofa in our house.
There’s a dip there now.
How I long to turn us into a day trip.
You belong in that chair over there
asking what happened with that text
and where I bought this jumper,
Cameron Tricker
See the local estate agent crooks
Ten a penny
Smoking their rollies, washed down with
protein
Pigeons with emerald necks
Elizabeth Osmond
Difficult doctors don’t care about their patients,
They are filling up hospitals and GP practices with their difficult bodies.
They are often late to work and shuffle into handover . . .
Jay Whittaker
. . . .We would go
to the cupboard where multi-packs
of Fine Fare’s basic crisps were sorted
into old shoe boxes, one for each child.
Kate Maxwell
I’d rather be inside
pretending I’m not
pretending commentary
inside my head
is real and here
Jim Murdoch
Some things we hold in trust,
some we forget we even own
and then there’re those items
we hang onto “just in case.”
Andrew McDonnell on Father’s Day
Somewhere to get to The light is growing in the East the headlights skim the road that runs beside the flooded fields we’re a month off blossom when it comes I will drape myself in the year’s renewal and ask how many times I will see my little...
Anna Lewis
With the neon-splashed night at the window
I counted each contraction down, obediently,
as my mother had told me to do.
Bobbie Sparrow
You ask me why
I put myself through that,
as if I jumped out of a plane
14,000 feet of fear and longing.