Today’s choice
Previous poems
Mark Smith
Divining
In the portacabin that morning, men smoked
and looked at last week’s paper again.
There was no water to fill the urn.
The first job – to get connected
to water and power. A slow hour went by
of dirtied cards landing on the table.
I was less than a year out of school.
This is what work was going to be.
The foreman stamped in demanding to know
why no work was done. ‘No water. No cement,’
he was informed. The foreman stamped out
and through the perspex window we saw
him snap two thin branches from a dead tree.
‘Right, lazy bastards, after me!’
Boots shuffled on the cement-dust floor.
Roll-ups were folded into ashtrays.
The foreman held the branches.
I followed the men through the door.
The hunched back of his reflective jacket
turned to the east, to the south, to the east
again, until he tapped a current
strong enough to set the rods twitching.
The rods crossed and we all stood around,
until somebody lifted a shovel
and started to dig for the pipe that held
living water in the living ground.
Mark Ryan Smith lives in the Shetland Islands
Anne Symons
She was only a little woman
five feet nothing in nylon stockings.
‘If I stood sideways they’d mark me absent.’
Ben
When she said ‘could’, it was clearly in italics
and when she said ‘one day’, the creak of glaciers
shuddered around its edges.
Dragana Lazici
the days are long but the years are short.
seconds are tiny kitchen knives in my back.
i stopped reading Dickinson, her voice is a sad parrot.
Abigail Ottley
Faces, unless they come swimming up close. are a blur of piggy-pink and ice-
cream. In the street, she doesn’t know, cannot be certain when to smile, when to
look away
Maggie Mackay
The teacher is an old spindly man. Grim, out of a Grimm’s tale. Scarecrow hair, thinning. Unsmiling.
Natasha Gauthier
The tawny clutch appeared
on high-heeled evenings only,
slept in a nest of white tissue.
Romy Morreo
She only speaks to me these days
through groaning floorboards in the night
and slammed doors.
Emma Simon
No-one has seen a ghost while breast-feeding
despite the unearthly hours, the half-light
mad sing-song routines of rocking a child
back to sleep.
Kushal Poddar
The furniture covered in once
transparent now foggy sheets
craft the room a morgue, and we
identity the bodies