Today’s choice
Previous poems
Stephen Keeler
How to get here
Among the joys of love was when we got
our first apartment on a boulevard
above the trams and tree-tops and the wires
that cut the street like tangram puzzles and
our friends would come with olives and cheap wine
they found the place by following the maps
I drew in coloured inks with metro stops
hand-lettered street names and my drawing of
the dappled fountain they must pass to find
us and I drew these maps for you so that
you’d find me too I having been brought up
on maps and globes and paths marked out for on
and off the beaten track the map of you
the glorious map of you that even now
I could bring back in inks from memory
indelible as tram-lines and the paths
that crossed the park the dogs on leads the girls
with prams the foreign grass marked out with signs.
Stephen Keeler’s award-winning poetry is widely published in journals, magazines, anthologies and online. His small collection ‘They Spoke No English’ is published by Nine Pens Press and his (prose) memoir, ’50 Words for Love in Swedish’, won the 2022/23 People’s Book Prize. He was long-listed in this year’s National Poetry Competition and has edited anthologies for, among others, Candlestick Press. Substack @stephenkeelerwriter
Rachael Clyne
And if a land loses its people and they
are exiled will a land feel their absence
Tom Nutting
They have been burying us,
not realising
we were seeds
of revolution.
Emily A. Taylor
I move my hand long
so yours will follow, and though
this moment tastes of tequila soda
paracetamol pillowed on a fizzing tongue
amnesia… pull me in anyway.
Steph Morris
No way would they let him keep that tag. They saw
a boy they must rename, must mark
from them, a boy whose limbs folded far too gently,
Eryn McDonald
It is here that the day breaks apart
Like ice on frustrated frozen pond
Here in the grounds of Ashton Court
I wish to bury myself amongst the green
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.