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.
Hattie Graham
wait for the witch who comes to pick wild garlic.
Together we can be brave and
pull the green bits from her teeth.
Wandering the glen with
nothing in our pockets, we can search
for the place where fairies still live.
No one will find us there,
not even the old grey bell they ring at tea time.
George Parker
I make broth, feel odd wiping it off your face
moments after swiping through bodies, preferences,
dates. Sunset-orange forget-me-nots mar the napkin cloth
Nicolas Spicer
Paysage Moralisé
There’s more to this three-foot square:
lilac vetch & vermilion
field-poppies, some sort of crucifer . . .
Luke Bateman
Brown limpets with tonsured heads
creeping over the fish-stink isle,
spongy underfoot, seaweed for grass.
Adam Horovitz
Such stillness in the air. The attic window
is a cupped ear set to alert the house to subtle
shifts in atmosphere: auguries; signs; any tiny
notice of cataclysmic change. . .
Jenny Mitchell
What Part of Me? Sun demands a front row seat above the graveyard through the trees when my mother’s placed in soil, surrounded by her friends’ small talk – She must have sent the rays for us. Women in their Sunday best, men in greying suits...
L Kiew
Land has dried its eyes, grown hard
hands and interrogates each arrival:
Where are you from, really from?
David Redfield
If we think we are right
the sun may never set;
Helen Evans
Things I did then that I hadn’t done before
Asked the neighbours if they wanted anything in my online weekly shop and
Bought yeast, flour, long-life milk and 70-per-cent-alcohol hand sanitiser and
Cut my own hair, even the bits round the back I couldn’t see, and