Today’s choice
Previous poems
Lesley Burt
Shell-like
either –
a conch found in hot white sand
on the shoreline at Sanur Beach
a Fibonacci whorl
among morning offerings –
left with reverence
lapped by ripples –
while bright boats with sails
proclaiming Bintang Beer
ferry tourists across the reef
to the roll and surge where
surfers rise and fall
or –
glass fashioned in Murano
to conjure memories of Sanur
and banana-leaf baskets of rice
its form fired
in Laguna di Venezia
from quartz silica sand
in shades of turquoise
edged with white
imitating a conch’s
spikes and whorl although –
pressed against the helix of your ear –
its weight is silent
Lesley Burt lives in Dorset. Her first pamphlet, ‘Mr & Mrs Andrews Reframed’, was published by Templar Poetry in 2023 and ‘Alice spins her Glitterball’ by Tears in the Fence in 2024. Website – payhip.com/LesleyBurtPoetry
Alfie Nawaid
a cowboy is that split second of doubt between victim
and victor, quick whipcrack out the corner of the mouth,
Stuart Rawlinson
I’m nineteen, I’m ancient.
I am so hungover
one of my eyes has fallen out…
Susie Wilson
Ceilings don’t hold water well.
Burst a pipe at the top
of an apartment block
to test this theory, if you will.
Andy Breckenridge
Abertawe After Richard Siken For CHD Tell me about the time I mansplained that Swansea is the English for Abertawe and means town at the mouth of the River Tawe. And about when, from the hill above Rhossili beach Lundy Island’s spectral mass...
Mark Wyatt
Daedalus
Plato loved his incessant questioning
of the natural world’s engineering
Sue Wallace-Shaddad
I tempt you with morsels
of soft-skinned peach, a pear sliced
in quarters, pipless and skinless.
Lesley Burt
Red-hot-pokers blazon her two world wars in flowerbeds, and in her hearth. The coalman drops odd nuggets under gaslight for neighbours to fetch in a bucket.
From the Archives: Dipo Baruwa-Etti
Seats
Before a table of white
People, I stand with ballet
Slippers strapped/soft soles
Head pointed towards the angels…
Ian Harker
The first night you lay down your head in London
there is hawthorne between your sheets.