Today’s choice

Previous poems

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 hanky,
his Sunday best

fold the hanky, break the match
get everyone to feel it
before he mended it again.

They all said Oo! When dad did that.

But the best was getting chocolate
from the level crossing
behind the house on Gwinear Road.

Dad put ha’pennies on the tracks
for trains to squash as big as pennies
for the sweetie slot machine.

He was clever like that, my dad.

 

 

Anne Symons comes from Cornwall and began writing poetry in retirement. She completed an MA in Writing Poetry at Newcastle University and the Poetry School in London. Her debut pamphlet Shifting Sands, was published by Littoral Press in 2024

Sylvie Jane Lewis

Being quiet and easily tired by being alive among people, I take
the cowardly route to community. I curate a digital garden of oddity.

At best my phone is a menagerie of queers: trinket makers, amateur
playwrights, witches, and, over and over again, my own personal monarchy.

Magnus McDowall

We rolled out on Seven Sisters Road,
two crates of Tyskie empty in my stairwell.

We were talking from the chest, walking backwards
crackling air above our heads like streetlights

Sarah Boyd

He’s a house of cards, a delicately balanced pyramid
held together by hearing aids and dusty bifocals and
wobbling dentures and ageing pacemaker and
shirt with three buttons missing in action and

Samantha Carr

You became obsessed with nucleated red blood cells when you peeked through an
aperture window at your liquid, viscous nature. You became obsessed with maps

Helen Akers

we’re trying to construct a frame for this
‘highly reactive impulsive emotion’
the nurse is looking into it