Today’s choice
Previous poems
Sue Spiers
Eels
Anguilla anguilla
I wrote a metaphor using eel
for blue-light reflections in water
on a flooded motorway
and mentioned glittering scales.
My writing group said skin
which didn’t have the same feel
for an ambulance’s race
seen through windscreen blurs.
The only time I’ve seen an eel –
it was grey and jellied
at a West Ham fan’s wedding
breakfast – I didn’t eat any.
Mucus skin and memory
of a Fenland writer’s poems
about a stepfather who farmed them,
or fished them, in one-way-in-
no-way-out willow baskets.
She used eel as a metaphor
for a claustrophobic landscape
and feeling trapped.
Sue Spiers works with Winchester Poetry Festival and is working her fourth collection through potential publishers, and there’s a fifth on the way. More here: www.spiropoetry.com
Alan Hardy
Made a list.
A record.
The dishes she ate.
Monuments visited.
In Paris.
Susana Arrieta
Tempting death with every cobblestoned step
his face was a collection of broken records
Peter Leight
There’s more waste than we use for the things we ordinarily use waste for, such as piling it on barges and sending them out to sea, tucking it under the surface like a layer of insulation . . .
John Grey
there are some lives
lived poolside
and others that
mostly consist of
a bent back in a field –
Adam Flint
All summer automatic exits remain
open, and no one leaves or boards.
David Van-Cauter
You are pleased to see me
in my gothic T-shirt –
those bats, you say, have been your friends.
Mark Wyatt
yes of course/ it was idyllic, reclining (pint of/ cider in hand) poolside in the harvesting/ sunlight
Catherine Shonack
when confronted with vast, endlessness of the ocean
who wouldn’t go mad?
Ansuya Patel
Women scrape coins from their purse,
count pennies, one lifts up a watermelon
in mid-air like raising a newborn to light.