Today’s choice
Previous poems
Alice Huntley
The tenderness of beans
slack in a bag from the freezer aisle
shaken out like shrunken grey memes
I long for the podding of beans
to run my thumbnail once more
down the dark seam of your housing
over broad lumps and bumps
that split open to fuzzy white lining
where you lie like silent siblings
waiting to be held and counted:
six, seven, and sometimes a baby eighth
I used to wish I could zip up the pod,
put you all back where you began
nestled in darkness – but then
I’d miss the ritual unclothing:
hot blanch of kettle water
sharp squeeze at one end
as each inward green – so bright and tender –
leaps from my fingers with a squirt
leaving odd empty pouches
and a little seal at the end like
two lips pursed in kindness
Alice Huntley is an estuary girl, born by the Humber and living by the Thames. She has an MA in Chinese Studies and writes & reads with local poetry groups in Richmond and Twickenham. Her work deals with memory and the body and has appeared in Mslexia, the Waxed Lemon and Ink Sweat & Tears.
George Turner
Some days, the privilege of living isn’t enough.
The weight of the kettle is unbearable. You leave the teabag
forlorn in the mug, unpoured.
Craig Dobson
Slowly, ordinarily, the unimaginable happens,
lowering the past into the dark,
covering it.
Clive Donovan
If I were a ghost
I think I would shrink
and perch on wooden poles
and deco shades – get a good view
of what I am supposed to be haunting
Rose Ramsden
We left the play early. It was the last day before the start of secondary school. Dad told me off for slapping the seats
Seán Street
There was a time when I took my radio
into the night wood and tuned its pyracantha
needle along the dial through noise jungles
to silent darkness at the waveband’s end.
J.S. Dorothy
Find yourself by the lake,
its icy membrane split by the long
arrow of a skein, reflected
flurry of wings, cries
bawling.
Sarah Rowland Jones
The terns lift as one
from the salt-pools behind the beach
– a thick undulating line
Jean O’Brien
Winter soil is hard and hoar crusted,
birds peck with blunted beaks,
pushing up are the blind green pods
of what will soon be yellow daffodils,
given light and air.
Jean Atkin
We scoured the parish tip most weeks, when we were kids.
We clambered it in wellies. Ferals, we scavenged
in the debris of the adults’ lives.