Today’s choice

Previous poems

Alex Josephy

 

 

 

A Vision
after Sujata Bhatt

the goddess of the library
extends in cloth-bound curves
along a lettered shelf

sometimes her skirts are leather
trimmed with gold, hems starred
with colophons

in other corners, she’s Make Do
and Mend, relics held together
with browning sellotape

she is all belief, all scepticism;
under her wide cloak
cities cluster, small eyes shine

she sends her children out to play
entrusting them to pockets,
shoulderbags

reliant on the curiosity
of strangers, the way every story
needs to tell itself again, again

when they return late, foxed, stained
with the juices of the world,
she tucks them back, alpha to omega

 

 

Alex Josephy lives and writes in Sussex and Italy. Her pamphlet Again Behold the Stars, was a Cinnamon Press award winner 2023. Her third full collection, ‘A Little Bridge’, will be published by Pindrop Press in 2025. www.alexjosephy.net

Kirsty Fox

Winged     Kirsty Fox is a writer and artist specialising in ecopoetics. She writes lyric essays and poetry, and has had work published by Apricot Press, Arachne Press, and Streetcake Magazine. She has a Masters in Creative Writing and is currently studying...

Jason Ryberg

Sometimes I’d swear that
the ancient box fan I’ve hauled
     around with me for
     years is a receiver for
     the conversations of ghosts

Peter Wallis

Dead in a chest,
 are folded matinee jackets, bonnets, bootees and mitts.

Tissue sighs like the sea at Lowestoft,
   always Third week in August

Amanda Bell

We clipped a window through the currant, sat on folding chairs with keep-cups,
wrapped in blankets as we yelled through the prescribed two-metre gap.
Then took to mending – darning socks and patching favourite denims

A W Earl

Doors

My parents’ house became a place of closed white doors,

where sound hung spare and echoes found no junk 

or clutter to rest themselves upon.