Today’s choice
Previous poems
Nathan Evans
Great Depression
If they ask where I am, tell them: I am
wintering. I have secreted small acorns
of sadness in crevices of gnarled limbs
and shall be savouring their bitternesses
on the back of my tongue until the days
lengthen.
But mainly, I’ll be sleeping:
while they beaver away under skies
painted Prussian Blue and Payne’s Grey,
I shall snore under layers of fat and fur
I worked for all year, until the days
wax warmer.
Only then shall I venture
from my lair to take the spring air; sore
eyed, they’ll stare, wonder who is that
creature—so slender, so eager? And
I’ll declare it is I, the grizzled bear—
tendered make-over by my nature.
Nathan’s poetry has been published by Muswell Press, Royal Society of Literature, Manchester Metropolitan University, Fourteen Poems and Broken Sleep. His debut collection, Threads, was long-listed for Polari First Book Prize, his second, CNUT, is published by Inkandescent.
nathanevans.co.uk
Cameron Tricker
See the local estate agent crooks
Ten a penny
Smoking their rollies, washed down with
protein
Pigeons with emerald necks
Elizabeth Osmond
Difficult doctors don’t care about their patients,
They are filling up hospitals and GP practices with their difficult bodies.
They are often late to work and shuffle into handover . . .
Jay Whittaker
. . . .We would go
to the cupboard where multi-packs
of Fine Fare’s basic crisps were sorted
into old shoe boxes, one for each child.
Kate Maxwell
I’d rather be inside
pretending I’m not
pretending commentary
inside my head
is real and here
Jim Murdoch
Some things we hold in trust,
some we forget we even own
and then there’re those items
we hang onto “just in case.”
Andrew McDonnell on Father’s Day
Somewhere to get to The light is growing in the East the headlights skim the road that runs beside the flooded fields we’re a month off blossom when it comes I will drape myself in the year’s renewal and ask how many times I will see my little...
Anna Lewis
With the neon-splashed night at the window
I counted each contraction down, obediently,
as my mother had told me to do.
Bobbie Sparrow
You ask me why
I put myself through that,
as if I jumped out of a plane
14,000 feet of fear and longing.
Chris Rice
You wake up (so you tell me)
to the lurid gold of summer
splashed like paint across
your tea-brown walls