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
Alex Josephy
the goddess of the library
extends in cloth-bound curves
along a lettered shelf
Ben Banyard
There were hundreds of them, all in period costume,
each generation explained who they were,
queued like at a wedding reception to greet us.
Lindsay McLeod Espinoza
Venus passed over the south node of the Moon today
Ilse Pedler
She offered up her linen bag to me, said
pick a shell my lady and I’ll tell your fortune
Sue Butler
Squirrels have beheaded all my parrot tulips
and the supermarket is out of chilli, also tabasco sauce.
Cormac Culkeen
the sun is a
white coin
lifted
from the sea
Maurice Devitt
Yes, you gave us your elegant hands
and capricious smile, but as I make my way
to the chiropodist this morning,
it’s your feet I’m thinking of . . .
Martin Ferguson
Pursue the facsimile
of the attendance sign;
here you must join the line.
Peter Branson
Emerge, from way beyond the pale, one day,
clenched feet an amulet about your wrist