Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jenny Robb
Strange Brew
Anne dances to the beat of my childish heart,
sings to cobwebbed spiders.
She is nanny number five,
my own Mary Poppins.
By the light of a wolf moon,
my father turns mad.
Anne whispers to a girl in the wind,
and a friend blows into my life.
The friend is greedy for what is mine.
My books become hers,
my dolls answer only to her.
She burns me with just-spent matches.
Anne has stolen my birth stone,
dumped a changeling in my nest.
She sings as she stirs broth for my mother.
Jenny Robb has been writing since retiring from a social work and NHS career, mainly in mental health. She’s been published widely and has two collections with Yaffle Press: The Doll’s Hospital, 2022, and Hear the World Explode, 2024. X: @jirobb Instagram: jenny_robb
Steven Taylor
A very long time ago
Stephen Fry’s godfather, the
Justice, Sir Oliver Popplewell
Who chaired the inquiry
Into the Bradford City
Amirah Al Wassif
Beneath my armpit lives a Sinbad the size of a thumb.
His imagination feeds through an umbilical cord tied to my womb.
Now and then, people hear him speaking through a giant microphone—
Singing,
Cracking jokes,
Mark Smith
In the portacabin that morning, men smoked
and looked at last week’s paper again.
There was no water to fill the urn.
The first job – to get connected
Toby Cotton
A blustery day –
the wind too strong for kites
or for lifts to the sky.
“To a thoughtful spot,” it cites
and pins me to the earth.
Ansuya Patel
except this burnt red vase.
Hand shaped in the muffled roar,
devouring flame in the furnace’s mouth.
Hannah Ward
Look, Drew, the
plums are in
pieces beneath
us. I dreamt:
Andrea Small
a flower is not a heron
does not stand on one leg
spear-billed over golden carp
Usha Kishore
At dawn and dusk, my father
becomes a chant, that flies above
the courtyard of the old house
Jane Frank
The leaves are a colour you’ve never seen
but that I will learn to expect
and there’s a fracas-induced full moon