Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jasmine Gibbs
Messages, Signs, Codes
This morning – Blackstar,
Bowie, those jazz swan songs
sputtering from the CD player,
wild trumpets that convulse
through negative space. Funny,
coincidences like that; awoke
to a bonewrong feeling,
my senses pricked like
antennae cosmically tuned.
Tried not to believe them:
messages, signs, codes –
but then the news Kim
effervescent, ephemeral,
a supernova burned out
in a hospice, long knelled
but refusing The End
as foretold, far too busy
to die, far too gorgeous.
And then I am back
at my shelf, dusting a finger
over cased spines, lingering
at those dark auto-eulogies
by accident? By chance?
watching blackthorns spurt
their nectared nebulae,
crocuses, tulips, daffodils
holding out against the late
frost, a warble of robins
fluttering from the tarmac
like tiny Houdinis only
just escaping the killing
crunch of wheels,
whilst I exhale
smoke signals from out
my kitchen window.
Jasmine Gibbs is a poet from Great Yarmouth. Her work can be found in The London Magazine, And Other Poems, Gutter, and Ambient Receiver.
Katie Beswick
We were on my pink love seat
skin touching skin
I was drunk but longing
circled me, like stars
from a cartoon head wound
Kate Hendry
So what if there’s a dead patch.
Remember the havoc
unfettered fire makes –
Christtie Jay
My Lord, let the record show
she remembered everyone else
before this. If you must, take her
in teaspoons
May Grier
I wasn’t to know
that it was a three-tusked
beast; that there was not one,
not two, but three
that grew the seed of me.
Daniel Hill
On her first day home, she took
to plucking the sky with tweezers—
latched on to clouds and waited
Sheila Saunders
Which is the subject?
Limp-leaved yucca
reluctantly dying,
the foreground figure
in its stony pot?
Trelawney
What is holding you back from building your wormery?
You can’t say there isn’t the time. Everyone has the time
when it comes to a wormery. Born with the right tools to hand.
David Van-Cauter
…4am and the birdsong begins, a wet January in a new city and I’m alone watching a man in Minnesota, murdered for protecting a woman from a fascist hit squad. . .
Tim Dwyer
Unexpectedly
My neighbour
opens her window
for fresh salty air