Today’s choice
Previous poems
Nigel King
Aquamarine
My compass – its needle set with a sliver of blue stone – spins and spins. Breath mists my snow
goggles. I wipe them endlessly. Even in these thick seal-skin mitts my hands are frozen. I have been
no place as still as this. As white. Beneath my feet, there’s yard upon yard of ice, and below it,
black water flowing. Sharks, old before I was born, coast in mile-wide circles, hunting skate, cod,
wolffish, or scavenging the bodies of whales. Sea lillies filter-feed, anchored on wrecks. I leave a
trail of sparkling footprints, a track from nowhere to nowhere. The ship is far off, with whoever’s
left of my companions. My vision blurs in the endless glare. Is that a bird soaring in the distance, or
a floater drifting across my retina? The needle spins on. All directions are the same. I choose one
anyway.
Nigel King lives in Huddersfield, where he is a member of the long-running Albert Poets group. He recently completed a Master’s in Creative Writing at MMU. His Pamphlet, What I Love About Daleks, was published by Calder Valley Poetry.
Douglas K Currier
Afternoon hangs in the air, and the birds leave.
Frogs begin to talk to each other, and the heat congeals.
Stephen Chappell
If you could call that friend,
the special one,
the one you always love and know loves you
Marius Grose
Until the dead, sucked from leaf mould graves
are rising in forest sap, to make connections
inside strange green brains
Andrew Keyman
a day later you’re in l.a. picking out cars with the magic
only money can buy
Chrissy Banks
So many times I walked
head down half asleep
along that ordinary road to school
Christopher M James
She’d had the two of us, had learnt
how children bury their riddles, how love
unearths them
Opeyemi Oluwayomi
They are piercing knife between
the city, detaching the body from the head,
& squeezing the blood out of the flesh,
so there can be an end to what hasn’t begun.
Rhian Thomas
I sit to fumble some intrusion from my shoe.
A shard of stone, no bigger than a thought, its ridged face
cutting like some old lover, like a baby or
an old preacher drumming something that irks like a worn out song
Erwin Arroyo Pérez
Here, in my Manhattan room / insomnia tugs at me like a half-closed taxi door / letting all the echoes in
/ an ambulance carries the last breath of an asthmatic man