Today’s choice
Previous poems
Dawn Sands
Prevention Science
Walking home from the lecture on Frankenstein
through the November mizzle, small breaths of exhaust
sighing in the twilight headlights, particles of wet air commingling.
When I look into the branches of the evergreens
I can imagine myself in Shelley’s Geneva, the still lake glittering
in the half-light. It is no surprise
to see her sitting on the bed when I go in, sixteen and pre-Creature.
At night she has sex with her future husband on
or near her mother’s grave, but for now her legs are folded
on the mattress, dark curls brushing her shoulders.
She has read philosophy, and is educated in classical antiquity. Tea?
I ask. She nods. I flick the switch on the kettle. She is unperturbed
by electricity, seems content in this urban microcosm of unwashed plates,
orange rinds and chocolate wrappers, photos of old friends and I in technicolour
— on the bus, in class, in the dresses
we wore to bid farewell to youth. Ciardi’s
High Tension Lines Across a Landscape on a poster
stuck to the wall; laptop, iPad, phone. Bible.
Psalm 21 on the wardrobe, I lift my eyes to the hills.
I take out the pump for the air mattress. Mary grins
and grabs the sleeping bag. She already knows what it is,
this tangle of purple cloth that feels like a cloud. We watch Star Wars:
Revenge of the Sith, because Mary loves sci-fi and men with
troubled designs of great futures. We caterpillar
down the hallway steps in the early hours, land in a heap
of synthetic fabric on the plastic floor. In the morning,
she has gone, crept back to the early nineteenth century in
polyester pyjamas to have sex on her mother’s grave.
I pulled Mary Shelley out of time, and still I could not save her.
Dawn Sands is an undergraduate English student at the University of Warwick. A Foyle and Tower Poet, she has also been published by Poems on the Underground, PERVERSE, and elsewhere. You can find her on Instagram @dawnllswriter.
Adam Flint
All summer automatic exits remain
open, and no one leaves or boards.
David Van-Cauter
You are pleased to see me
in my gothic T-shirt –
those bats, you say, have been your friends.
Mark Wyatt
yes of course/ it was idyllic, reclining (pint of/ cider in hand) poolside in the harvesting/ sunlight
Catherine Shonack
when confronted with vast, endlessness of the ocean
who wouldn’t go mad?
Ansuya Patel
Women scrape coins from their purse,
count pennies, one lifts up a watermelon
in mid-air like raising a newborn to light.
Pippa Little
a woman’s rage cannot raise the dead
but it may split stone like lightning
Abiodun Salako
a boy grows tired
of dying again and again.
i am building him a morgue
for Thanksgiving.
Patrick Wright
It’s as if the dream
is telling me we are still joined
somehow, despite waking
and me trudging on, even though
your voicemail is off, your locks
changed.
William Collins
We carry the shame of Paragraph 352D
folded into suitcases at foreign borders,
where love is questioned like a crime,
and disbelief stamped heavier than visas.
They tell us to run for our lives —
but only if we can do it quietly.