Today’s choice
Previous poems
Sue Spiers
Eels
Anguilla anguilla
I wrote a metaphor using eel
for blue-light reflections in water
on a flooded motorway
and mentioned glittering scales.
My writing group said skin
which didn’t have the same feel
for an ambulance’s race
seen through windscreen blurs.
The only time I’ve seen an eel –
it was grey and jellied
at a West Ham fan’s wedding
breakfast – I didn’t eat any.
Mucus skin and memory
of a Fenland writer’s poems
about a stepfather who farmed them,
or fished them, in one-way-in-
no-way-out willow baskets.
She used eel as a metaphor
for a claustrophobic landscape
and feeling trapped.
Sue Spiers works with Winchester Poetry Festival and is working her fourth collection through potential publishers, and there’s a fifth on the way. More here: www.spiropoetry.com
Jan Swann
You seem very far from home
and who would after all choose a grit pocked
pavement to languish on
Gwen Sayers
Clouds spit on the coffin,
wring oily rags, splash
a woman, her violin
cased in sunken purple.
Dave Wynne-Jones
And did she break your heart?
A woman asks, perhaps imagining
A fallen chalice . . .
Simon Maddrell
Four years in Knockaloe was a living
inspiration for inventor Joseph Pilates.
Tom Kelly
At thirteen I am competing with James Joyce,
encouraging pain, at the very least discomfort.
Nick McGaughey
And here you are slid from the rain
under my door, “s” -ing along the cool
checks in the hallway.
Poetry from UEA MA Scholars 2024/2025: Grace Phillips and On Zi Rui
You bought peppermint and bubbles,
monologued in the corner.
You barely looked at me twice.
– Grace Phillips
I looked at the neon lights
Gazing, I asked myself :
“What am I sourcing for now that I am without you ?”
– On Zi Rui
Jade Prince
What is here for us but these walls and the
pearls of sweet yearning behind them
Esha Volvoikar
The earth cracks and we are left
with the same shared moon.
She peers through my lattice window
and hides behind your city’s smoke.