Today’s choice

Previous poems

Sally Festing

 

 

 

A Basket of Nettles and Larks

Life lines still arc round the base of each thumb
though the bulk of hand’s muscle mass
lies in the thenar bellies, now flat as linoleum

and tendons smart branches when I brace fingers,
interrupting hillocks of skin.

The heart line runs under my wedding ring,
fused to the engagement ring (one college afternoon).

If I massage the mudflats in this wicked pack of cards,
flies swarm its spiderwebs. But valiantly my head line tramps
through my palm’s basket of nettles and larks.

 

 

Sally Festing’s new poetry collection, Meeting Places (Mica Press), will be launched 22 May 2025 (6-8.00pm) at Norwich’s Maddermarket Bar. The poems wrap up love, blood ties, art, and aging in a spikey bundle. She’s a seasoned North Norfolk author (https://www.sallyfesting.info).

Fiona Heatlie

  Planet Nine You talk to me intently of black holes. I slip my hand into yours, unnoticed. You are absorbed in thoughts astronomical. I am stealing time. Swallowed by a constellation of brighter stars and suddenly you are on the cusp of the cusp of a place where...

Hongwei Bao

    Night Market   When the night curtain falls, the crowd start to assemble as if drawn by magnets, as if answering a scared call. Neon lights go up along the narrow pavements, illuminating the concentrating faces of food-sellers. Under boiling noodle...

Darren Deeks

You have been burgled.
While you were out with the dog,
a burglar made best use of that
yawning kitchen keyhole to spook
through tracelessly

David Adger

being unnatural
he fixes his sight past the fields
of bere and oat and the woods
of birch, his goat-eyes watch
two worlds at once

NJ Hynes

It was so quiet she could hear her hair grow,
heartbeat stretch across measures, nails twist
into mobius strips . . .