Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jenny Robb
Strange Brew
Anne dances to the beat of my childish heart,
sings to cobwebbed spiders.
She is nanny number five,
my own Mary Poppins.
By the light of a wolf moon,
my father turns mad.
Anne whispers to a girl in the wind,
and a friend blows into my life.
The friend is greedy for what is mine.
My books become hers,
my dolls answer only to her.
She burns me with just-spent matches.
Anne has stolen my birth stone,
dumped a changeling in my nest.
She sings as she stirs broth for my mother.
Jenny Robb has been writing since retiring from a social work and NHS career, mainly in mental health. She’s been published widely and has two collections with Yaffle Press: The Doll’s Hospital, 2022, and Hear the World Explode, 2024. X: @jirobb Instagram: jenny_robb
Geraldine Stoneham
The silence and peace of this place
creeps through on birdsong.
Emma Lee
The instruction invites overthinking:
describe your hometown through
the medium of simple sentences
Vanessa Napolitano
I ask my father to dinner, pretending he is still alive,
ask him what he’d like. He says a pork chop which is not
something I know how to cook.
David Forrest
I don’t know why you bother with poetry Vlad mutters as he adjusts the current in the magnets, forcing them to rhyme with each other.
Neil Fulwood
Today’s operative on the ohrwurm shift
has hacked the WiFi password
in the ear canal and now I’m looping back
endlessly to a misheard lyric . . .
Ira Lightman
Laid down, his upraised face is
White – offputting – on a plumped pillow.
Dave Wynne-Jones
“The all-consuming passion
is rarely found
more than a recipe
for misery,”
you read
Pat Edwards
He appears like a paper bag blown onto the feeder,
punching his beak time and again into the peanuts.
Kate Noakes
If you follow faerie lights
that wisp where boardwalk
becomes trackway, make sure
you’re stocked with milk,
or bread and salt.