Today’s choice
Previous poems
Steph Morris
Summers in black
Who’s idea was it? I think his, as I’d started
wearing everything from Oxfam. Among my finds
collarless shirts. There was I
and my clique, ourselves fearfully
fresh, seeking out lived-in things, clothing
with more history than us.
This although a year or two back
we’d so hated hand-me-downs.
So he started offering me his old clothes first,
trying to help his son – to understand.
And as my favourite colour became the colour
he wore for work, he gave me his old shirts,
all black of course, washed-out and worn-in,
collarless, just a circular band around the neck,
with a slit either side at the front
where the stiff white strip slipped in.
Obviously I wouldn’t be wearing that bit,
ever. But the shirts I lived in
all summer, loose, but still black,
a couple of buttons open, neck free,
something most Jesus and Mary Chain fans
didn’t have – something he could do.
Steph Morris’ poems appear in his chapbook Please don’t trample us; we are trying to grow!, in the anthologies Joy//Us, Poetry Prescription: Becoming, Up//Roar, and in various magazines and gardens.
Annette Iles
across the street
I am washed off my feet
my heart
splashes up into pieces
Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig
Dusk is dancing & all the visual technologies at hand feel
overwhelmed: mobile eye, pit pastels, graphic card.
It’s down to language, then, imagine.
Antony Owen
Twenty- something sex are bodies.
thrown down like sophomore prose.
Martin Mooney
The footbridge was skinned in graffiti – slogans, threats,
declarations of love, swastikas. Grek. Kost. Lapse.
Aardhra Chandran
Canvas boots, pig-iron tacks.
At midnight, the wooden platform groans like a hull.
Jason Lovell
While children kneel at your cage in awe
edge offerings of cashew nuts, chopped fruit,
curse words into your magnificent beak,
mums settle carrier bags at tired wet feet
Elijah MacBean
My Name is My Name Ami never let anyone call my sister Sam – it always had to be Samina. She said she’d rather be waterboarded than let her daughter be whitewashed by whites too conservative to spare the extra syllables. Ami never let anyone call...
Damen O’Brien
The coastline’s smile is sharp with blackened teeth,
seabird shelters, scarps, cutaways, broken reefs:
the bloody mouth of a boxer who can’t be dropped,
punch drunk with the brain’s purple pounding . . .
Gwil James Thomas
Terrestrial locomotion
across concrete,
the inverted pendulum,
moving flesh and boot –