Today’s choice
Previous poems
Elaine Baker
To my Ovaries
My cahoonas. My muscular daisies.
Potent white olives. You make me sick.
My mute twins on tricycles. Femme fatales.
Relay racers. Nightmares wished upon stars.
In my brain you’re pendula on speed.
My climax on the horror film screen.
You are landmines inside me,
birth and death simultaneously,
two tickers, with all a heart’s grief,
none of its mercy. You’re mad for procreation.
You’re my future on the run.
My past gunned down in the street.
Elaine Baker is the author of poetry chapbooks: Dancing in Babylon, Winter with Eva (both V Press) and five-point-palm (Red Ceilings Press). She lives in the wilds of Norfolk. Find her on X @kitespotter, Instagram @elainebaker76 and at: www.elaine-baker.com
Charlotte Oliver
On a bench outside Next,
a punctured woman
traces circles in the air with
a pale finger
Peter Devonald
He is bitterest regrets,
dark chocolate, olives and kale,
The Telegraph and Magritte’s
pipe, the treachery of images.
Anne Ryland
Restless two-hundred-year-old village elder,
a ragged playground of words, or is it weeds –
fragments of chant to slaps of skipping rope.
Colin Dardis
I have never climbed a tree,
never broken a bone
and will never walk on water.
May Garner
The house keeps score
in places no one checks any longer.
Sally Spiers
Night’s white noise is over. Day arises
to stillness. Light crouches behind windows
Tim Brookes
In the charity shop I try on a coat
flocked with fake shearling,
shaved-soft almost: fibres
fired onto plastic to fool the wrist.
Kim Waters
You’re a character, a Roman numeral,
an internet meme. Descendant
from a peasant’s crook or cattle prod,
you’re the twelfth letter of the alphabet,
Sylvie Jane Lewis
Being quiet and easily tired by being alive among people, I take
the cowardly route to community. I curate a digital garden of oddity.
At best my phone is a menagerie of queers: trinket makers, amateur
playwrights, witches, and, over and over again, my own personal monarchy.