Today’s choice
Previous poems
Elizabeth Loudon
Forty (for Maryna)
The first three days of war
have a surprising holiday feel.
No deadlines, just the giddy gasp of shock.
Ordinary life continues.
The girl in white socks in the flat downstairs
plays a prelude then turns, pleased,
to an audience of one, who awakes
as if from a deep sleep
and manages to applaud.
Later, you hear sirens and grab sugar lumps
for the baby, throw slippers to your father
who can’t tie his shoes.
In the tunnels you sit close together for warmth.
Nobody sings. In the cold you realise
you left your favourite red jacket on the bus,
but this is no time for tantrums
when there are boys face down,
all for a few square metres of mud,
who were once face down upon you.
It takes forty nights to become accustomed
to anything that strips you to the core:
a difficult birth, cold-eyed jailor,
our failure to come to your rescue.
The little green light beside your name
still said available. Any earlier,
we’d have screwed up our entrance.
It’s not easy, either, sitting on the side-lines
and stroking the lithium-lit news, over and over.
It looks like we’re smiling.
We’re not. It’s what our faces do
when they hurt, stuffed with words
that are hard to spit, harder to swallow.
If you’d only feel sorry for us.
Elizabeth Loudon is a poet and novelist living in southwest England after 25 years in the US. She writes about violence, loss and displacement, and mothers and daughters. When not writing, She’s mostly outside. There’s more at www.elizabethloudon.com.
Zeeshan Choudhury and Emma Lara Jones for Day Two of our Archive Feature
Took my pain, buried it in buttercream.
Unboxed, licked off the top, Masticated
each grain into saline, let my bloodstream
drip-feed membranes their acid-fat. In bed,
-Zeeshan Choudhury
consists of tiny pink erasers,
safety pins, shirt buttons and the odd
butterfly clip.
-Emma Lara Jones
Mymona Bibi for Day One of our Archive Feature
corners folded
edges worn.
where girls in
the night’s meski
giggle in secret
hair in tangles.
Catherine O’Brien
When all is quiet save for the silky rustling of an autumn breeze
let that love show.
When your patience is darkness-dappled and as weary as an exhausted scholar
let that love show.
Marianne Habeshaw
session in the woods. Someone took a feather
to the hairdressers. Gum cross-sectioned
my cheek; he forgot about removal to kiss.
Had to avoid tree roots, placed us on green.
He mentioned his bullied niece kept reaching
for her blanket; Mr. Smith is quaking regression,
Fergal O’Dwyer
but sunlight streaming in
through impractically curtainless windows;
my skin, made-up in golden light,
looking taught from affluence
and vitamins.
Like they do in films,
Hattie Graham
wait for the witch who comes to pick wild garlic.
Together we can be brave and
pull the green bits from her teeth.
Wandering the glen with
nothing in our pockets, we can search
for the place where fairies still live.
No one will find us there,
not even the old grey bell they ring at tea time.
George Parker
I make broth, feel odd wiping it off your face
moments after swiping through bodies, preferences,
dates. Sunset-orange forget-me-nots mar the napkin cloth
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.