Today’s choice

Previous poems

Alex Searle

 

 

 

 

Something started you to wake,
leaving sockprints in the parquet,
there was only the dark,
until a hair sliver of light
softly glowed on your feet asleep.
Behind the closed door,
he was there,
your father,
smoking quietly
with himself
staring at the black,
a familiar witness
to the screaming matches
riddling your ears.
You creak on the cold wood
wanting to go in and lie in his lap,
but the light turns off,
your feet become invisible again,
he does not emerge.
You go back to bed,
the light stays black
but he does not emerge.

 

 

Alex Searle is a South African-based writer of essays and poems exploring childhood, relationships, culture and the embodied masculine. He is also a musician, podcaster and corporate poet. He publishes frequently on Substack @alexsearle

Alison Patrick

A dozen snail shells exposed on dry soil
in the archangel’s cut brown stalks.
Banded like fairground sweets and helter-skelters . . .

Julie Egdell

At the shore of impossibility
last moments come to nothing
all our plans die in the salt air
of another new day on the black sea.

Pat Edwards

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.