Today’s choice
Previous poems
Tamara Evans
Return
Travel West. Submerge yourself
in the M4’s homeward drift.
Remember how
its nightly glow
bewitched the kid
at your bedroom window?
It looked like fire, didn’t it?
Exit at junction 34.
Drop into street view
Follow the lane
down past prickly fields
where swallows zip.
Remember those kids
pulling petals
from clover heads?
Sucking sugar
from each wet tip?
Close your bedroom door.
Listen for tawny owls
and the InterCity.
Watch pipistrelles twist
in the velvet night
like you used to.
As they always did.
You remember, don’t you?
You remember everything.
Tamara Evans’s poems have been published in Poetry Wales and in the Write Out Loud Milestones anthology, and selected to appear on buses in London and Brighton in Poetry on the Buses competitions. Find Tamara on bluesky, instagram.
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.
Matt Bryden
You used to wind yourself in curtain turning taut,
look down at your feet, pirouette
as the fabric hugged you in.
James Coghill
the undershrub, shored up,
stakes its waspish claim,
its hereabouts
Peter Bickerton
The gull
on the meadow
taps her little yellow feet
like a shovel-snouted lizard
dancing on a floor of lava
Lydia Harris
ask this place
ask the silver day
the steady horizon
the self-heal the buttercup
the hard fern in the ditch
ask the bee and the tormentil
Seán Street
Dogs in spring park light
pulled by intent wet noses
through luminous grass