Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jim Murdoch
Minder
Care is a state in which something does matter – Rollo May
I didn’t know what to do with all my dad’s love
so, I minded it for him fully intending to give it back one day.
Thing is, that day never arrived, the time never seemed right
and things always got in the way but the love kept on showing up.
Instead, I started to think in terms of some kind of grand gesture
but every time I looked at those boxfuls of love it seemed
such an impossible thing to pull together.
He will pass before me, decades before—
barring accident, assault, ailment and act of God—
and I’ll have to do something with all the boxes then,
I don’t know, maybe rent a storage unit or something,
because certain things charity shops simply refuse to take,
like underwear or dentures and other people’s love.
I mean, I could just bin it all but that feels wrong.
Like tearing up old photos.
Jim Murdoch: Scot, gatophile, honorary woman, classical music aficionado, novelist and producer of half-to-three-quarter-(and-occasionally-actually-fully)-decent poems for over half a century.
Anna Bowles
Nothing bad can happen on a plane.
Engine fires, earache, hijackers; but no new grief.
Kirsty Fox
Winged Kirsty Fox is a writer and artist specialising in ecopoetics. She writes lyric essays and poetry, and has had work published by Apricot Press, Arachne Press, and Streetcake Magazine. She has a Masters in Creative Writing and is currently studying...
Jason Ryberg
Sometimes I’d swear that
the ancient box fan I’ve hauled
around with me for
years is a receiver for
the conversations of ghosts
Peter Wallis
Dead in a chest,
are folded matinee jackets, bonnets, bootees and mitts.
Tissue sighs like the sea at Lowestoft,
always Third week in August
Amanda Bell
We clipped a window through the currant, sat on folding chairs with keep-cups,
wrapped in blankets as we yelled through the prescribed two-metre gap.
Then took to mending – darning socks and patching favourite denims
Anna Maughan
Illness had left me
brittle as frost, icicle-thin
swaddled in borrowed warmth
Angeliki Ampelogianni
on marble tiles bird like
I am a pin measuring drops in the toilet bowl
A W Earl
Doors
My parents’ house became a place of closed white doors,
where sound hung spare and echoes found no junk
or clutter to rest themselves upon.
Finola Scott
Winter dusk soughs in, dark
clouds threaten, tangle her wool.