Today’s choice
Previous poems
Robin Vaughan-Williams
Does anybody want any money?
I’ve got all this money lying around.
Have you got anything you can do with it?
I asked Josie but she doesn’t want it.
Klio says the extension is already paid for.
Geoff has a job and wants to pay his way.
Craig says he wouldn’t take blood diamonds
so why would he take my money.
Sangita thinks our family may have benefitted from slavery
and ought to make repararations.
Jim says he could screw it up for stuffing the money cushions
in his Hidden Comforts exhibition. But he wouldn’t spend it.
Jemma would stuff it up her nose.
Lyra is trying to live without money altogether.
Troy says it’s too much. Aisha says it’s not enough.
Not enough for a deposit. Not enough to live off.
Enough to blow but not enough to make up for lost benefits.
I gave it to Pati but they gave it back with interest.
Now Craig thinks I’m a moneylender
and Lyra is tearing the curtains in the temple.Alex doesn’t have any plans.
Alex doesn’t have any plans. She doesn’t know what she’d do with
it. I might give it to her anyway. Everything tastes better with
money.
Robin Vaughan-Williams (Instagram: @robinrvw) is the author of The Manager and How to Fix a Human. He runs collaborative poetry improvisation workshops and his poems have appeared in places like Anthropocene, Dream Catcher, Under the Radar, and Obsessed with Pipework.
Nicolas Spicer
Paysage Moralisé
There’s more to this three-foot square:
lilac vetch & vermilion
field-poppies, some sort of crucifer . . .
Luke Bateman
Brown limpets with tonsured heads
creeping over the fish-stink isle,
spongy underfoot, seaweed for grass.
Adam Horovitz
Such stillness in the air. The attic window
is a cupped ear set to alert the house to subtle
shifts in atmosphere: auguries; signs; any tiny
notice of cataclysmic change. . .
Jenny Mitchell
What Part of Me? Sun demands a front row seat above the graveyard through the trees when my mother’s placed in soil, surrounded by her friends’ small talk – She must have sent the rays for us. Women in their Sunday best, men in greying suits...
L Kiew
Land has dried its eyes, grown hard
hands and interrogates each arrival:
Where are you from, really from?
David Redfield
If we think we are right
the sun may never set;
Helen Evans
Things I did then that I hadn’t done before
Asked the neighbours if they wanted anything in my online weekly shop and
Bought yeast, flour, long-life milk and 70-per-cent-alcohol hand sanitiser and
Cut my own hair, even the bits round the back I couldn’t see, and
Kirsty Crawford
Elizabeth is hiding in the cupboard under the sink
Small enough to fold between cream cleaner and floor polish
Too big to keep elbows away from wire wool
Katie Beswick
You wouldn’t believe how quick they grew —
Our babies were men now. Lifting bags of concrete
they rebuilt cities, slab by slab, reinforcing cracks.