Today’s choice
Previous poems
Bel Wallace
Interior
My dear, I washed you out of my sheets.
And now I sleep softly in them.
My dreams are sweet and free.
I opened the windows to air out
your smoke. I liked it for a while, how
it held the past in its wispy fingers.
I emptied your cigarette butts
from my ashtray. The Cuban one, heavy.
Remember? It waited a half-life for you.
I scoured your dense coffee
from my cups. You broke one. Elegant,
with painted roses. It doesn’t matter.
I threw away your shoes. Every time,
you left a pair behind, like two footprints
in ancient rocks.
I put back the furniture you’d rearranged,
restored my writing corner. Low sun
streams in, now we’re past the Equinox.
And still, my love, our dead skin cells
persist. We mingle in the house-dust,
dancing in the slow winter sunlight.
Bel Wallace‘s poetry has been short-listed for the Bridport Prize, nominated for the Pushcart and published in a range of journals, most recently Anthropocene, Magma and Under the Radar. She’s trying to finish her first novel, but keeps getting distracted by poetry.
John Greening
On Stage in a home-made model theatre, c.1967 Glued to your block, in paint and ink you wait for Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life to stop. Smell of hardboard and hot bakelite. The lino curtain’s ready to go up. At which, the straightened coat hanger is shoved and on you...
Anna Bowles
Nothing bad can happen on a plane.
Engine fires, earache, hijackers; but no new grief.
Kirsty Fox
Winged Kirsty Fox is a writer and artist specialising in ecopoetics. She writes lyric essays and poetry, and has had work published by Apricot Press, Arachne Press, and Streetcake Magazine. She has a Masters in Creative Writing and is currently studying...
Jason Ryberg
Sometimes I’d swear that
the ancient box fan I’ve hauled
around with me for
years is a receiver for
the conversations of ghosts
Peter Wallis
Dead in a chest,
are folded matinee jackets, bonnets, bootees and mitts.
Tissue sighs like the sea at Lowestoft,
always Third week in August
Amanda Bell
We clipped a window through the currant, sat on folding chairs with keep-cups,
wrapped in blankets as we yelled through the prescribed two-metre gap.
Then took to mending – darning socks and patching favourite denims
Anna Maughan
Illness had left me
brittle as frost, icicle-thin
swaddled in borrowed warmth
Angeliki Ampelogianni
on marble tiles bird like
I am a pin measuring drops in the toilet bowl
A W Earl
Doors
My parents’ house became a place of closed white doors,
where sound hung spare and echoes found no junk
or clutter to rest themselves upon.