Today’s choice
Previous poems
Steph Morris
Summers in black
Who’s idea was it? I think his, as I’d started
wearing everything from Oxfam. Among my finds
collarless shirts. There was I
and my clique, ourselves fearfully
fresh, seeking out lived-in things, clothing
with more history than us.
This although a year or two back
we’d so hated hand-me-downs.
So he started offering me his old clothes first,
trying to help his son – to understand.
And as my favourite colour became the colour
he wore for work, he gave me his old shirts,
all black of course, washed-out and worn-in,
collarless, just a circular band around the neck,
with a slit either side at the front
where the stiff white strip slipped in.
Obviously I wouldn’t be wearing that bit,
ever. But the shirts I lived in
all summer, loose, but still black,
a couple of buttons open, neck free,
something most Jesus and Mary Chain fans
didn’t have – something he could do.
Steph Morris’ poems appear in his chapbook Please don’t trample us; we are trying to grow!, in the anthologies Joy//Us, Poetry Prescription: Becoming, Up//Roar, and in various magazines and gardens.
Alice Huntley
slack in a bag from the freezer aisle
shaken out like shrunken grey memes
I long for the podding of beans
Rhonda Melanson
The magic of growing things, its tangible beauty, I did not understand.
Clive Donovan
I go to the top of the risen hill,
above the trees, beyond the grass,
where only hard ground lives
Gary Akroyde
We searched for it
through the tarmac in every rain-bruised sky
in dark Pennine shadows where great mills
spewed out ringlets of ghost-grey fog
Nathan Curnow
I like to think it’s a story about himself and Einstein
floating in zero gravity, Albert sailing through the capsule
toward his drifting pipe, Brian playing We Will Rock You—
Paul Short
Sleep.
Elusive as lucid dreams.
Closed eyes teem wotsit-orange,
spiderweb scarlet &
thatch-brown
Ash Bowden
Out again with the pitchfork churning
compost into the old green bin, stinking
and silent as an ancient earthen vat.
Mallika Bhaumik
This is not a frilly, mushy love letter
to a city whose allure lies in defying all labels and holding the mystery key to a man’s heart, though none has ever been able to lay an absolute claim on it,
Jena Woodhouse
Around midnight, the hour when pain
reasserts its dominance, a voice
behind the curtain screening
my bed from the next patient’s:
an intonation penetrating abstract thoughts