Today’s choice
Previous poems
Kate Bonfield
May long weekend
Coming home to days of heat
trapped beyond the door, to time skewed
by time away, the house bigger and
smaller than before.
As if magnified, a hornet lies dead
by the baffling window
ridiculously detailed and weightless
in the new breeze, shifting.
Another dies nearby, tightens
to a comma then straightens, repeating
on a Domino’s flyer I use to take it outside.
I doubt it survived there.
This happened another May:
emerging in the old, cold room
taken in by green seen through glass,
the house stuffed solid with the shut-up noise
of their oversized hopelessness.
Kate Bonfield lives and works in Dorset.
Elena Chamberlain
My trans friends and I just want to go swimming
in cold water
without a thousand eyes watching.
Regina Weinert
It was the snatch of a dream,
someone said this is not
what you do in the desert,
it was one precise thing, not a list . . .
Philip Dunkerley
We leave early, drive for two and a half hours,
park, find the church where you were married.
Marc Janssen
The sky opens
Blinking its single slackened eye.
Sigune Schnabel tr. Simon Lèbe
She cut letters out of me,
which quietly and unnoticed
danced red poems.
Pat Edwards
He is in white-out, stopped in his tracks,
dying for the comfort of a fag.
He makes a chalice around the flame,
hands becoming shield so he can light up.
Pamilerin Jacob
Annette the gap-toothed,
You kissed a man & I was born. You gave him
your laughter & he built an empire,
Fatihah Quadri Eniola
There is an album of all the men
your mother have loved. It sits every
night in the deep silence of the
basement.
Nathan Evans
If they ask where I am, tell them: I am
wintering. I have secreted small acorns
of sadness in crevices of gnarled limbs
and shall be savouring their bitternesses
on the back of my tongue until the days
lengthen.