Today’s choice

Previous poems

Julian Dobson

 

 

 

The small press publisher

You too I guess
have studied the surviving starlings

as they swoop and whistle
by the snack trailer at Moorfoot
glinting for crumbs of flaky pastry

like a glimpsed field of dandelions

and everything turns holy – you
shouldering your bag
of printer-fresh smooth pages

halting the gutterwebbed streets
with round words, delicate
as dust-jackets. See

how those walked syllables
arc into hollow air
in tattily furnished function rooms

or slip through letterboxes,
little pearly grenades.

 

 

Julian Dobson’s work has appeared in numerous print and online journals, including Stand, The Rialto, and Tears in the Fence. Julian lives in Sheffield but hasn’t yet learned to love mushy peas.

Lesley Curwen

Her feet snagged in a cleverly-placed net
my sister waits for him to untangle her,
to hold her head still between thick fingers . . .

From the Archives: In Memory of Jean Cardy

      Denizens Mice live in the London Tube. A train leaves and small pieces of sooty black detach themselves from the sooty black walls and forage for crumbs in the rubbish under the rails that are death to man. You can’t see their feet move. They...

Tina Cole

Mr. Pig modelling his best Sunday suit of farmyard smells,
flees from the cook’s cleaver to find himself a sow.

Ellora Sutton

My heart is breaking, so I’m setting up my new Wonder Oven.
The waft of toxicity as I run it on empty for ten minutes
is a welcome distraction.

Bob King

The first wristwatch was first worn
in 1810, despite what old turn-it-up
Flintstones episodes might have you
believe.

Brandon Arnold

Alone, I drive along the midnight, winter road. My left hand at the 12 o’clock position of the steering wheel. And I coast. I let out the day’s long breath, which started out today as a sigh.

Steph Ellen Feeney

My mother is here, and might not have been,
so I hold things tighter:
the small-getting-smaller of her
running with my daughter down the beach . . .