Today’s choice

Previous poems

Craig Dobson

 

Funeral
 
Slowly, ordinarily, the unimaginable happens,
lowering the past into the dark,
covering it.
You’ll live to receive the haunts of jagged occasion
blunting to dust and dream
in the sift of going on.
Till then, though, this keeps you. The bleak clothes
turn away to leave, while – stood
between the living’s
parked cars and the ranked stones of the dead,
with all the propriety of funeral
directors’ men –
whatever’s left of the future hides its boredom
and bows its head.

 

Craig Dobson has had poetry, short fiction and drama published in several magazines and is working towards his first collection of poetry.

Jenny Mitchell

      What Part of Me? Sun demands a front row seat above the graveyard through the trees when my mother’s placed in soil, surrounded by her friends’ small talk – She must have sent the rays for us. Women in their Sunday best, men in greying suits...

L Kiew

Land has dried its eyes, grown hard
hands and interrogates each arrival:
Where are you from, really from?

Helen Evans

Things I did then that I hadn’t done before
 
Asked the neighbours if they wanted anything in my online weekly shop and
Bought yeast, flour, long-life milk and 70-per-cent-alcohol hand sanitiser and
Cut my own hair, even the bits round the back I couldn’t see, and

Kirsty Crawford

Elizabeth is hiding in the cupboard under the sink
Small enough to fold between cream cleaner and floor polish
Too big to keep elbows away from wire wool

Katie Beswick

You wouldn’t believe how quick they grew —
Our babies were men now. Lifting bags of concrete
they rebuilt cities, slab by slab, reinforcing cracks.

HLR

I find six errors in the proofreading manual & the irony doesn’t tickle me.
I am enraged by typos, poor formatting, missing commas. This is my Big Girl Job,
the one I always wanted —