Today’s choice
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SJ Lunn-Rockliffe
Pillar saint
Crammed onto his high
stone square, he cranes
to see the whole number
of eternity as it unwinds
its relentless gilded length,
trailed by bi-plane cherubim
and their seraphic cousins –
but he is granted only
a raw bald pate
horned thoughts
of silk and bells
an alkaline draught
from a far-off well
fire ants beading
their wrath into
his toe folds
and the sour
roar of believers
at his column base,
begging for a
sign, a word,
a fingernail of
hope for
their cattle
their bellies
their men,
a swelling on
the jaw,
cyclical
fevers,
failing milk,
the cries of a
nameless newborn –
while he awaits the
blank
of the seventh day.
SJ Lunn-Rockliffe is Associate Professor in the Divinity Faculty at the University of Cambridge, where she teaches, reads and writes about the histories of ancient religions. She works on ideas about thinly embodied beings like demons.
Jenny Mitchell
There’s no one in the flat when I come home from school,
my dinner in the fridge – poison on a flowered plate,
covered with tin foil, surrounded by full shelves of poison.
Sarah James/Leavesley
The sister I don’t have
has pockets bulging
with silver-foiled chocolate
Andy Humphrey
On screen, Dad was
the radical –
the introverted
pen-and-notepad kind,
Chrissy Banks
Sun comes out, my body opens
all its folding doors, its windows.
mulika ojikutu-harnett
remember when we lived
in the shrubs? stewed in a shared
room. its stench. our own
L.B. Jørgensen
As the whole town picked sugar beets,
their breath hugged
furrows in pre-dawn darkness.
Mel Joy
a line of hanging hooks
bent us into the dining hall
where we ate like birds
Judith Taylor
He reads aloud about visiting the Underworld in dreams,
seeing his dead again. Through the big window behind him
there’s a flowerbed and some long grass
Anne Symons
Magic Pennies My dad was a magician. He could make a penny disappear with a twist of his wrist just vanish in thin air to pluck it later from your ear or nose. People laughed when dad did that. He’d put a matchstick in the centre of a clean white...