Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jean Atkin
Finders
We scoured the parish tip most weeks, when we were kids.
We clambered it in wellies. Ferals, we scavenged
in the debris of the adults’ lives.
Like a mad deck shuffled, our tip turned up
a fat brown teapot without a lid/ a yellow rubber duck/
a huge string vest/ a Playboy stash/
a galvanized bucket, base burned out by ash.
We shrieked and burrowed through the sodden sacks,
won a red ballcock, no chain. And why so many
rusty bicycles with missing spokes?
We delved a split tea crate
for crimson curtains, slung them
round our shoulders to make mildewed cloaks.
Then I carried home a violet on a broken plate.
Jean Atkin’s third full collection High Nowhere is was published last year by IDP. Previous publications include How Time is in Fields (IDP); The Bicycles of Ice and Salt (IDP) and Fan-peckled (Fair Acre Press). She is a poet in education and community. www.jeanatkin.com
Philip Rösel Baker
He allows the sound to pour
through invisible canals inside his body,
outpacing dull analysis,
quickening cells, illuminating mind,
like blinds lit from within.
LGBT Feature with Elizabeth Gibson, Jay Whittaker and Rob Miles
Syncing
Butch elegy
If he asked about the grave
LGBT Feature with Jaime Lock and Simon Maddrell
Transmasculine kiss
To The Committee on Homosexual Offences
LGBT Feature with Helen A Porter, Kat Dixon and Milla van der Have
i told her she had plum cheeks
(poly)grammatical gymnastics
girl wild moon
LGBT Feature with Godelieve de Bree, Casey Garfield and Anna Maughan
buffoon
untitled exhale
To My Child
Sophie Kearing
sometimes i miss
those carefree days
of driving around
listening to crucial conflict…
Alison Jones
Each year I am looking for signs,
a white pebble, a dropped feather,
shy shadow’s shape, red thread burning…
Nigel King
Convolvulus strangles
cow parsley and nightshade.
Its pure white trumpets plead:
Forgive us! Look how lovely we are…
Eve Chancellor
Payday Mid-afternoon and the streets smell of petrichor; people spilling out of pubs, crowding to smoke cigs in the early spring sunshine. I am alone, again. All my friends live thousands of miles away. I am closer to the people who are not near me...