Today’s choice
Previous poems
Sally Jenkins
The Biology Department
Funny how Year 8 is doing bones
now, of all the weeks. In the prep room
we strip flesh off chicken wings,
steep the bones in acid til they bend
like rubber, and the girls shriek.
Cardboard femur and tibia
jointed with split pins swing,
and I sing while I work: the toe bone
connected to the foot bone,
now hear the word of the Lord.
I carry the skeleton in my arms
from Art back home to Science.
We sway like Fred and Ginger,
my fingers falling between its ribs
makes me weep.
I carried your crushed weight home
Mum, in a paper bag ribboned like a gift.
Tucked you under my bed to sleep.
Sally Jenkins is currently studying for the MA in Poetry Writing at The Poetry School, London. This is her first publication.
Patrick Deeley
As you rummage of a morning
among dust-furred personal effects
jumbled in an old
wooden suitcase under a bed . . .
Terry Jones
The Lake District Tourist Board
has had no input into what
you are now reading, but I so
miss Cumbria in Holy Week
Mary Mulholland
Who will pick the apples now she’s gone?
Samantha Carr
She has few secrets with her translucent map skin of blue underground rivers visible to scale.
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.
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.