Today’s choice
Previous poems
Oliver Comins
Milk break, lunch break
Working the land on good days, after Easter,
people would hear the breaks occur at school,
children calling as they ran into the playground,
familiar skipping rhymes rising from the babble.
An ample fence stood between them and the farm
where their voices entwined with summer air,
sounds of village families, echoes of belonging.
Between the breaks, a country silence rose—
various nestling of feet in grass, a distant thuck
of axe on wood and that sibilance of leaves.
The school is closed now, converted, gone.
There are no breaks to freshen up the days
or disperse the background rumble of transport.
The hills are closing in, their strict rows of pine.
Oliver Comins recently returned to the Midlands after living in the Thames Valley and West London for many years. His poetry is collected by The Mandeville Press and Templar Poetry.
https://templarpoetry.com/
Zeeshan Choudhury and Emma Lara Jones for Day Two of our Archive Feature
Took my pain, buried it in buttercream.
Unboxed, licked off the top, Masticated
each grain into saline, let my bloodstream
drip-feed membranes their acid-fat. In bed,
-Zeeshan Choudhury
consists of tiny pink erasers,
safety pins, shirt buttons and the odd
butterfly clip.
-Emma Lara Jones
Mymona Bibi for Day One of our Archive Feature
corners folded
edges worn.
where girls in
the night’s meski
giggle in secret
hair in tangles.
Catherine O’Brien
When all is quiet save for the silky rustling of an autumn breeze
let that love show.
When your patience is darkness-dappled and as weary as an exhausted scholar
let that love show.
Marianne Habeshaw
session in the woods. Someone took a feather
to the hairdressers. Gum cross-sectioned
my cheek; he forgot about removal to kiss.
Had to avoid tree roots, placed us on green.
He mentioned his bullied niece kept reaching
for her blanket; Mr. Smith is quaking regression,
Fergal O’Dwyer
but sunlight streaming in
through impractically curtainless windows;
my skin, made-up in golden light,
looking taught from affluence
and vitamins.
Like they do in films,
Hattie Graham
wait for the witch who comes to pick wild garlic.
Together we can be brave and
pull the green bits from her teeth.
Wandering the glen with
nothing in our pockets, we can search
for the place where fairies still live.
No one will find us there,
not even the old grey bell they ring at tea time.
George Parker
I make broth, feel odd wiping it off your face
moments after swiping through bodies, preferences,
dates. Sunset-orange forget-me-nots mar the napkin cloth
Nicolas Spicer
Paysage Moralisé
There’s more to this three-foot square:
lilac vetch & vermilion
field-poppies, some sort of crucifer . . .
Luke Bateman
Brown limpets with tonsured heads
creeping over the fish-stink isle,
spongy underfoot, seaweed for grass.