Today’s choice
Previous poems
Kevin Denwood
Waiting Room
Name called.
Not mine.
Wasn’t I
here first?
A new arrival
spreads out.
One chair
always left empty.
I glance at copies of
National Geographic,
Vogue,
Woman’s Weekly —
all out of date.
It’s possible
they expired
while I was waiting.
Impatient sighs
mix with the soft
turn of a page.
I glance
around the room.
Nothing catches.
Some scroll frantically.
Others pretend to decipher
The Economist.
Most stare
into space
or at their shoes.
I read the poster
about prostate cancer
again.
Kevin Denwood is a Cumbrian poet whose work explores memory, ageing and everyday social observation. His poems have appeared in Free the Verse, Obsessed with Pipework, and Poems, Tales & Other English Words.
Susana Arrieta
Tempting death with every cobblestoned step
his face was a collection of broken records
Peter Leight
There’s more waste than we use for the things we ordinarily use waste for, such as piling it on barges and sending them out to sea, tucking it under the surface like a layer of insulation . . .
John Grey
there are some lives
lived poolside
and others that
mostly consist of
a bent back in a field –
Adam Flint
All summer automatic exits remain
open, and no one leaves or boards.
David Van-Cauter
You are pleased to see me
in my gothic T-shirt –
those bats, you say, have been your friends.
Mark Wyatt
yes of course/ it was idyllic, reclining (pint of/ cider in hand) poolside in the harvesting/ sunlight
Catherine Shonack
when confronted with vast, endlessness of the ocean
who wouldn’t go mad?
Ansuya Patel
Women scrape coins from their purse,
count pennies, one lifts up a watermelon
in mid-air like raising a newborn to light.
Pippa Little
a woman’s rage cannot raise the dead
but it may split stone like lightning