Today’s choice

Previous poems

Alex Josephy

 

 

 

DayGlo
after Ecclesiasticus 44.1

Let us now praise hi-vis men
who gather together
round a pothole, filling the gap
with their sticky black remedy.

Honour the yellow-gilet WPC
who knows how to listen,
called to a bus stop
just in time by a lost girl.

Let’s not forget Poppy the neon
lollypop operative,
nor the parakeet-bright
sanitary goods delivery crew.

Tell the DayGlo doozers
how they light our mornings,
gleaming waterproof orange
through the gloom.

Let’s almost die for love
of the one at the very top
of a crane at the boatyard,
sketching an arc in the sky

when his lime green forearm,
matchstick-delicate
from down here, tilts
a lever, sends a loaded pallet

swinging out above the jetty,
calms it to a standstill,
winches it down slo-mo, exactly
where it needs to go.

 

 

Alex Josephy lives and writes in Sussex and Italy. Her pamphlet Again Behold the Stars, was a Cinnamon Press award winner 2023. Her third full collection, A Little Bridge,  was published by Pindrop Press in 2025. www.alexjosephy.net

Tim Dwyer

      Shedding Annamakerrig It begins high up the chestnut tree with leaves on the twigs on the tips of branches where sap has slowed. Turning amber carried by the breeze they touch the earth, rest on the grass where autumn begins   Tim...

Sandra Noel

The sea happens to me today

not because I’m the woman in the bakers
brusque turned rude
or the peaches              still hard in the bowl

Grace Lynn

Sunlight saunters in long, thin wires through the fallow field
of my bedroom. You approach, a migrating heron
in a runny yolk collar and suntanned shorts, a white-light emissary
of hope. . .

Miriam Swales

I’m waiting for news I don’t want to talk about
and scrolling through old photos to escape.
After some swipes, I see you walking away.

Adam Horovitz

We cannot update you yet, other than to say we are caught
in a doldrums between stations and that your father can wait
as he has been waiting these past two years . . .