Today’s choice
Previous poems
Kathy Pimlott
Going down to do lights and curtains to fool any burglars
Twilight: one after another security lights click on
illuminating pathways, steps, empty front lawns,
triggered by my benign progress, then, disappointed,
click off. The sky is a layer cake of contrails, pink
shepherds’ delight and darkness holding a waxing moon
two days short of being Wolf.
All done, street lamps
cast my long shadow so it circles me as 1 walk back.
It grows and shrinks, scales walls. Sensing something
behind me, I stop, turn. There she stands, fox-smart
from nose tip to tail. I wait. She does too. I don’t run.
I say, ‘Off you go. This is my life not a Lawrence novella’.
Frost sets the road crackling as robins shout the night in.
Kathy Pimlott has a collection, the small manoeuvres, with Verve Poetry Press (2022) and three pamphlets with The Emma Press –Elastic Glue and Goose Fair Night and most recently After the Rites and Sandwiches (2024). www.kathypimlott.co.uk
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
Kate Bailey
They’ve mended the park fence again,
patched it over with the usual ugly metalwork,
like a riot barricade.