Today’s choice
Previous poems
Stephen Keeler
How to get here
Among the joys of love was when we got
our first apartment on a boulevard
above the trams and tree-tops and the wires
that cut the street like tangram puzzles and
our friends would come with olives and cheap wine
they found the place by following the maps
I drew in coloured inks with metro stops
hand-lettered street names and my drawing of
the dappled fountain they must pass to find
us and I drew these maps for you so that
you’d find me too I having been brought up
on maps and globes and paths marked out for on
and off the beaten track the map of you
the glorious map of you that even now
I could bring back in inks from memory
indelible as tram-lines and the paths
that crossed the park the dogs on leads the girls
with prams the foreign grass marked out with signs.
Stephen Keeler’s award-winning poetry is widely published in journals, magazines, anthologies and online. His small collection ‘They Spoke No English’ is published by Nine Pens Press and his (prose) memoir, ’50 Words for Love in Swedish’, won the 2022/23 People’s Book Prize. He was long-listed in this year’s National Poetry Competition and has edited anthologies for, among others, Candlestick Press. Substack @stephenkeelerwriter
Peter Leight
Instead of Dying I’m Taking a Trip
to Kansas
where the light appears
as if walking through a gate
in the air
Daniel Cartwright-Chaouki
Its timber frame held together by the waste
of its own decay
The rot a kind of glue undisturbed
Cracked panes of glass hold their fractures
Rosie Jackson
I Am Trying to Love Frank O’Hara More
I really am! I am trying not to see his exclamation marks as cheap melodrama and his endless conjunctions as some kind of separation anxiety or fear of mortality for what do full stops signify except dying
Charlotte Holm, Jennifer A McGowan
A leaky drainpipe drips
creating damp patches on uneven paving,
slime green algae blossoms
forming viridescent ripples
James McDermott
if samsara’s concrete please don’t come back
as black jackal for I live in Norwich
nor spineless worm as I don’t have a lawn
Cheryl Snell, Alice Gregorio, Peter Lilly
I grew up on a farm so I should know all about expensive cows and free milk. You’re taking being a debutante much too literally. We only meant to give permission for you to make a good match, not flit among the suitable boys…
Jade Kleiner
There is the green that birthed all pine trees.
Tom Blake
We were the housing and the housed,
meaning nothing except that
we were always occupied,
or to put it simply never out.
Kate Bonfield
Coming home to days of heat
trapped beyond the door, to time skewed
by time away, the house bigger and
smaller than before.