Today’s choice
Previous poems
Hélène Demetriades
By the Horns
At breakfast my man sticks a purple
magnolia bud in my soft boiled egg.
The flower opens, distilling to lilac.
On my autumn birthday he wrings
the necks of seven swallow-wings
to gift me the witch’s butter
wobbling like an orange nebula
above their nest –
Beyond the forest a doeling wire-snags
on the wrong side of the fence
tryingtosucklefrom nanny’s bulging udder.
Billy paws the turf, aiming his horns
at me like drop handlebars.
Hélène Demetriades has been longlisted in The National, 2023, and highly commended in the International Fool for Chapbook Award, 2023 & 24. Her debut collection The Plumb Line was published by Hedgehog Press in 2022. She won The Silver Wyvern, 2022, and has poems forthcoming in Magma and The Interpreter’s House. www.helenedemetriadespoetry.
Arlette Manasseh
You were the pine, softening the dirt I grew up in: the one I climbed in the breeze. Wanting to describe you, I had called you Paulie. That is not your name.
Lynn Valentine
A Bad Spell
The rowan by the house is cracked in two,
her bark ragged, grown good-for-nothing old.
Matt Nicholson
Cousin
I didn’t know who the call was about,
just that it was past my proper bedtime
Karen Hodgson Pryce
All at sea on a serenity of sheep,
we played monopoly, box tatty and frail.
Its missing chance cards, no get-out-of-jail.
Nicole Knoppová
Mami, I find myself wishing your memory
were a bird of prey—
red-tailed hawk or black vulture . . .
Ali Murphy
One Winter’s Line
Between underpants and saggy bra,
she hangs her fallopian tubes out to dry.
Harry Gunston
night knocks inside my dream
at the end of the world
death house
where sawdust covers everything.
Isobel Williams
If you’re asking how to get invited
To draw at a sex club . . .
Clare Currie on Mother’s Day
After learning about the maternal instincts of seals, I took to listing postpartum offensives