Today’s choice
Previous poems
Alice Huntley
I had a leaf in my hair when I arrived
the receptionist thought it was a hairclip
I didn’t know how to tell her I’d been doing my pre-op
under a beech tree, leaves drifting down like snow
fungus like a great carved shelf
bracketing the question when do we begin to die?
three ages of a tree: sapling, adult in crown
then the dying creature leaning on its own crooked arms,
fingers splayed, velvet skin slumping, gathering tenderly
over lumpen nodes where limbs once were
if our days are numbered may they be beautiful numbers,
numbers in their prime scampering soundless along
branches of all possible numbers, numbers of cells
multiplying, numbers of leaves, numbers of wrinkles
in our shared grey skin, myriad threads spooling out through
nodule and root, fibbonnaci ribbons, the final conclusion
that all is energy exchange, sugar and light, water and sap,
a slow movement from one state to the other,
that even in death, all is life.
Alice Huntley is an estuary girl, born by the Humber and living by the Thames. She has an MA in Chinese Studies and writes & reads with local poetry groups in Barnes & Chiswick, London. Her work deals with memory and the body and has appeared in Mslexia, Ink Sweat & Tears, Pennine Platform, London Grip, The Waxed Lemon and Poetry Worth Hearing.
Gordan Struić
Outside,
the city slides by,
blurred lines
of glass and rain.
Stephen Keeler
The days were huge and kind
and sometimes after school
we’d buy a bag of broken biscuits
for the long walk home
across the heavy heat of afternoon
on lucky days she wouldn’t take
the pennies offered up in supplication
Joseph Blythe
I swear I felt the swirly patterned paper
rip from the walls of my childhood bedroom.
It was the same stained cream shade as my skin –
pockmarked, cut and scabbed, dry and peeling…..
Denise Bundred
Shadowed boats bereft of sail
absorb the surge and slap
constrained by a blue-grey chink
of mooring chains.
Rahma O. Jimoh
A bird skirts across the fence
& I rush to the window
to behold its flapping wings—
It’s been ages
since I last saw a bird.
Samuel A. Adeyemi
I can already hear the chorus of my tribe.
They want the ancient blade,
the guillotine that hovered
above my head like a halo of death.
Mofiyinfoluwa O.
when you
know that your time with someone has almost run out, that is what you do. you look for
tiny things buried in the sand so that you do not have to look at the huge broken thing
standing between you both.
Chris Emery
and if we walk to the same sea later
we’ll see something heaving up beside us:
caskets of grey, white-capped, barren and loose,
the way memories are.
T. N. Kennedy
so you collect those poems which reveal
life at its most intense and solitary
turning them on when you most need to feel