Today’s choice
Previous poems
Carolyn Oulton
Autumn Fires
Unexpected as burned stone,
what am I supposed
to do with this memory?
The sudden shuffle of ash,
flames clicking like needles,
grey-cold flags. You there
just now – I can’t be sure
– perhaps about to be?
5 a.m., still curved
like wax on a bottle.
I don’t hear the taxi,
then he’s gone. I’m standing
by the window now,
a boy walks through the rain.
In the kitchen a girl, not well,
strokes her paints on water.
After lunch, rain clings
to the gutters.
A moment and a log
falls sharply, knocking smoke
across the room.
Already I know the grass
is wet outside the window.
Who it is I’m waiting for.
Carolyn Oulton is a Professor of Victorian Literature at Canterbury Christ Church University. She teaches on the Creative and Professional Writing BA and is Project Co-Lead for https://kent-maps.online/. Her most recent poetry collection is Accidental Fruit (Worple). @writing_at_CCCU
Paul Stephenson
Rhubarb after Norman MacCaig And another thing: stop looking like embarrassed celery. It doesn’t suit. How can you stand there, glittery in pink, some of you rigid, some all over the shop? Deep down you’re marooned, a sour forest spilling out beneath a harmful canopy....
Holly Winter-Hughes
You stand behind me / catch my eye / take the snatch of silver
Laura McKee
after the accident the plaster
held her still
Melanie Branton
At boarding school, I had no idea what to do
with myself. Most of the time,
I hid myself in a paper bag . . .
Lucy Calder
I arrange my books in order of height,
on a bank of cow parsley,
amid the random oscillations
of a cool breeze
Tanya Joseph
I know others blossom
but I vomit ectoplasm,
and squaring the corners of my bed,
the nurse reminds me I’m not dying.
Lucy Heuschen
It is known: a woman like that
brings evil on board.
Carolyn Oulton
Heat on the window
baking my face like a biscuit.
I move some hair, look over
at moss and narcissi, in a pot –
Jennifer A. McGowan
You have buried your mother and put
a memorial bench on a high hillside where
the wind blows sunsets straight through
and it’s always better to wear something warm.