Today’s choice

Previous poems

Sally Festing

 

 

 

A Basket of Nettles and Larks

Life lines still arc round the base of each thumb
though the bulk of hand’s muscle mass
lies in the thenar bellies, now flat as linoleum

and tendons smart branches when I brace fingers,
interrupting hillocks of skin.

The heart line runs under my wedding ring,
fused to the engagement ring (one college afternoon).

If I massage the mudflats in this wicked pack of cards,
flies swarm its spiderwebs. But valiantly my head line tramps
through my palm’s basket of nettles and larks.

 

 

Sally Festing’s new poetry collection, Meeting Places (Mica Press), will be launched 22 May 2025 (6-8.00pm) at Norwich’s Maddermarket Bar. The poems wrap up love, blood ties, art, and aging in a spikey bundle. She’s a seasoned North Norfolk author (https://www.sallyfesting.info).

Cindy Botha

what shows up at dusk
 
moths of course, pale parings―
filmy, restless
dark swarf of birds homeflitting
to perch-trees
sometimes a hedgehog
nosing leaflitter
an owl wooing from the pines

Vic Pickup

Operation Alphaman

It took a great effort and I had to bite hard on the stick
to push the subcostal muscles aside.
The skin had parted easily under my knife,
though keeping the blood at bay with no one to swab the wound
was difficult. This was remedied with a vacuum cleaner

Julian Brasington

When one has lived a long time alone
and not alone your time become
someone’s history and you have grown
tired of yet another war and the world
has it in for you simply for being

Nick Browne

Woman in the water

I’m no Ophelia, that’s for sure crazy stuff is not my style,
no garland weeds around my head it’s spindrift foam not daisies.