Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jennifer Cole
My Precious
Holding your cooling hand,
bedside, they said I had better
take your wedding ring
or it might get “disappeared”
its fading ghost now
a mere shadow on my finger.
So it hangs with mine –
twin markers round my neck –
chained together to show me
that time flows not in a line,
but in circles around scars
where pain won’t bend.
And when I feel the ground shift,
like a rip curl pulling me down,
around and around,
and can’t see the sky,
only taste salt water,
and can’t breathe,
bursting for air
but feeling nothing there,
I slip my finger in it,
my precious, cold & smooth,
and you appear –
your hand in mine,
your fingers in hold, to squeeze,
to ground me with warm gold.
Jennifer Cole’s poetic life started at the airport when she felt a real desire to write but was only able to do so by ushering herself and her three young girls into a bathroom stall and scribbling out a poem on a receipt. Now, she makes the time to write, whether prose or poetry, and finds inspiration in everyday actions, in everyday images, and in particular in the
writing itself. She has been published in The Broadkill Poetry Review, FLAR, Erbacce Press, The English Media Center, Mosiaque Press, Atlande Press, and Les Perséides.
Hannah Linden
She gives me a word to look up
in a dictionary of obscure sorrows.
I, who try to decipher echoes from
other people’s reaction to my words
throw down a bucket into the well
recognise water when people tell me
Nelly Bryce
Longing curls its legs up on the sofa in our house.
There’s a dip there now.
How I long to turn us into a day trip.
You belong in that chair over there
asking what happened with that text
and where I bought this jumper,
Cameron Tricker
See the local estate agent crooks
Ten a penny
Smoking their rollies, washed down with
protein
Pigeons with emerald necks
Elizabeth Osmond
Difficult doctors don’t care about their patients,
They are filling up hospitals and GP practices with their difficult bodies.
They are often late to work and shuffle into handover . . .
Jay Whittaker
. . . .We would go
to the cupboard where multi-packs
of Fine Fare’s basic crisps were sorted
into old shoe boxes, one for each child.
Kate Maxwell
I’d rather be inside
pretending I’m not
pretending commentary
inside my head
is real and here
Jim Murdoch
Some things we hold in trust,
some we forget we even own
and then there’re those items
we hang onto “just in case.”
Andrew McDonnell on Father’s Day
Somewhere to get to The light is growing in the East the headlights skim the road that runs beside the flooded fields we’re a month off blossom when it comes I will drape myself in the year’s renewal and ask how many times I will see my little...
Anna Lewis
With the neon-splashed night at the window
I counted each contraction down, obediently,
as my mother had told me to do.