Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jenny Robb
Strange Brew
Anne dances to the beat of my childish heart,
sings to cobwebbed spiders.
She is nanny number five,
my own Mary Poppins.
By the light of a wolf moon,
my father turns mad.
Anne whispers to a girl in the wind,
and a friend blows into my life.
The friend is greedy for what is mine.
My books become hers,
my dolls answer only to her.
She burns me with just-spent matches.
Anne has stolen my birth stone,
dumped a changeling in my nest.
She sings as she stirs broth for my mother.
Jenny Robb has been writing since retiring from a social work and NHS career, mainly in mental health. She’s been published widely and has two collections with Yaffle Press: The Doll’s Hospital, 2022, and Hear the World Explode, 2024. X: @jirobb Instagram: jenny_robb
Angeliki Ampelogianni
on marble tiles bird like
I am a pin measuring drops in the toilet bowl
A W Earl
Doors
My parents’ house became a place of closed white doors,
where sound hung spare and echoes found no junk
or clutter to rest themselves upon.
Finola Scott
Winter dusk soughs in, dark
clouds threaten, tangle her wool.
Huw Gwynn-Jones
Black is the colour inside black light on
blackened brick and slats
Clare Morris
Necessity, that scold’s bridle, held her humble and mean,
So that she no longer spoke, just looked –
Her world reduced to a search for special offers . . .
Alison Jones
Mrs Norris had thought ascension
would be whirligig rides in bright violet rays,
as the training books all implied.
Sandra Noel
The tide unpleats from her godet,
zig-zags in running stitch
round the base of the côtil.
Matthew Caley
supposedly: if I am to render
‘a man’ then
this ‘man’ must I guess resemble me‹›
Jenny Robb
The nun in charge of the children is thin, her back straight as punishment.