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.
Annabelle Markwick-Staff
I devoured the Olympics, filled my mouth
and scrapbook with sticky ephemera.
Charles G. Lauder
beneath night’s skin he unearths raw stones
serrated encrusted enigmatic cold
Arlo Kean
we are at a cafe just round
the corner from hampstead
heath & sipping berry sunrise
Paul Stephenson
Goya was an octopus that smelt of funerals on Mondays.
Sundays, the scent of getting ready.
Jessica Mookherjee for International Women’s Day
The pain comes plucked from a field
in a garland of sunlight.
Jenny Pagdin for International Women’s Day
After many moons
I am perhaps readying to speak.
Kate Noakes for International Women’s Day
Each year in March, on the eighth day,
the one we’re allowed to call ours,
slowly, Jess reads our names . . .
Julia Webb for International Women’s Day
hoover witch mum / mum on the rocks / mum’s coach horses / all the king’s mums /
Sue Burge for International Women’s Day
speaks whale, speaks star
breathes in — tight as a tomb
breathes out — splintered crackle