Today’s choice
Previous poems
Sue Spiers
Eels
Anguilla anguilla
I wrote a metaphor using eel
for blue-light reflections in water
on a flooded motorway
and mentioned glittering scales.
My writing group said skin
which didn’t have the same feel
for an ambulance’s race
seen through windscreen blurs.
The only time I’ve seen an eel –
it was grey and jellied
at a West Ham fan’s wedding
breakfast – I didn’t eat any.
Mucus skin and memory
of a Fenland writer’s poems
about a stepfather who farmed them,
or fished them, in one-way-in-
no-way-out willow baskets.
She used eel as a metaphor
for a claustrophobic landscape
and feeling trapped.
Sue Spiers works with Winchester Poetry Festival and is working her fourth collection through potential publishers, and there’s a fifth on the way. More here: www.spiropoetry.com
Peter Leight
Instead of Dying I’m Taking a Trip
to Kansas
where the light appears
as if walking through a gate
in the air
Daniel Cartwright-Chaouki
Its timber frame held together by the waste
of its own decay
The rot a kind of glue undisturbed
Cracked panes of glass hold their fractures
Rosie Jackson
I Am Trying to Love Frank O’Hara More
I really am! I am trying not to see his exclamation marks as cheap melodrama and his endless conjunctions as some kind of separation anxiety or fear of mortality for what do full stops signify except dying
Charlotte Holm, Jennifer A McGowan
A leaky drainpipe drips
creating damp patches on uneven paving,
slime green algae blossoms
forming viridescent ripples
James McDermott
if samsara’s concrete please don’t come back
as black jackal for I live in Norwich
nor spineless worm as I don’t have a lawn
Cheryl Snell, Alice Gregorio, Peter Lilly
I grew up on a farm so I should know all about expensive cows and free milk. You’re taking being a debutante much too literally. We only meant to give permission for you to make a good match, not flit among the suitable boys…
Jade Kleiner
There is the green that birthed all pine trees.
Tom Blake
We were the housing and the housed,
meaning nothing except that
we were always occupied,
or to put it simply never out.
Kate Bonfield
Coming home to days of heat
trapped beyond the door, to time skewed
by time away, the house bigger and
smaller than before.