Today’s choice

Previous poems

Julian Dobson

 

 

 

The small press publisher

You too I guess
have studied the surviving starlings

as they swoop and whistle
by the snack trailer at Moorfoot
glinting for crumbs of flaky pastry

like a glimpsed field of dandelions

and everything turns holy – you
shouldering your bag
of printer-fresh smooth pages

halting the gutterwebbed streets
with round words, delicate
as dust-jackets. See

how those walked syllables
arc into hollow air
in tattily furnished function rooms

or slip through letterboxes,
little pearly grenades.

 

 

Julian Dobson’s work has appeared in numerous print and online journals, including Stand, The Rialto, and Tears in the Fence. Julian lives in Sheffield but hasn’t yet learned to love mushy peas.

Rahma O. Jimoh

A bird skirts across the fence
& I rush to the window
to behold its flapping wings—
It’s been ages
since I last saw a bird.

Samuel A. Adeyemi

I can already hear the chorus of my tribe.
They want the ancient blade,

the guillotine that hovered
above my head like a halo of death.

Mofiyinfoluwa O.

when you
know that your time with someone has almost run out, that is what you do. you look for
tiny things buried in the sand so that you do not have to look at the huge broken thing
standing between you both.

Chris Emery

and if we walk to the same sea later
we’ll see something heaving up beside us:
caskets of grey, white-capped, barren and loose,
the way memories are.

T. N. Kennedy

so you collect those poems which reveal
life at its most intense and solitary
turning them on when you most need to feel

Mariah Whelan

      St Ann’s Square Manchester, 23rd May 2017 Because I cannot show you what is at the centre of all this I will lay language up to its edge, walk its edges the way I moved through the back of the crowd too afraid to go in. I had to shade my eyes from...

Marissa Glover

    What Might Have Been There is a small white house high on a green hill just south of Scotland, an office bright with books and a window overlooking Magdalene, and somewhere on a dirt road between endless pastures of strong red fescue, is a man on a...

Cherry Doyle

/ on the days / blood rushes at the corner of a nail / you cannot keep your jumper off the door handle / table tackles leg / expect the bruise in two days’ time / pansies nodding in speckles of rain /