Today’s choice

Previous poems

Jenny Robb

 

 

Strange Brew

Anne dances to the beat of my childish heart,
sings to cobwebbed spiders.
She is nanny number five,
my own Mary Poppins.

By the light of a wolf moon,
my father turns mad.
Anne whispers to a girl in the wind,
and a friend blows into my life.

The friend is greedy for what is mine.
My books become hers,
my dolls answer only to her.
She burns me with just-spent matches.

Anne has stolen my birth stone,
dumped a changeling in my nest.

 

She sings as she stirs broth for my mother.

 

 

Jenny Robb has been writing since retiring from a social work and NHS career, mainly in mental health. She’s been published widely and has two collections with Yaffle Press: The Doll’s Hospital, 2022, and Hear the World Explode, 2024. X: @jirobb Instagram: jenny_robb

Alison Patrick

A dozen snail shells exposed on dry soil
in the archangel’s cut brown stalks.
Banded like fairground sweets and helter-skelters . . .

Julie Egdell

At the shore of impossibility
last moments come to nothing
all our plans die in the salt air
of another new day on the black sea.

Pat Edwards

Pat Edwards

He is in white-out, stopped in his tracks,
dying for the comfort of a fag.
He makes a chalice around the flame,
hands becoming shield so he can light up.