Today’s choice
Previous poems
Anne Symons
Magic Pennies
My dad was a magician.
He could make a penny disappear
with a twist of his wrist
just vanish in thin air
to pluck it later
from your ear or nose.
People laughed when dad did that.
He’d put a matchstick
in the centre of a clean white hanky,
his Sunday best
fold the hanky, break the match
get everyone to feel it
before he mended it again.
They all said Oo! When dad did that.
But the best was getting chocolate
from the level crossing
behind the house on Gwinear Road.
Dad put ha’pennies on the tracks
for trains to squash as big as pennies
for the sweetie slot machine.
He was clever like that, my dad.
Anne Symons comes from Cornwall and began writing poetry in retirement. She completed an MA in Writing Poetry at Newcastle University and the Poetry School in London. Her debut pamphlet Shifting Sands, was published by Littoral Press in 2024
Rebecca Parfitt
In the back of the taxi on my way to the hospital,
thighs clenched together,
the driver asked me,
Samarth Agarwal
Here — in the absolute zero of space — fireworks!
Look how the crucibles of creation,
those million coloured fingers that stretch light years —
Jenny Scoones
We unlearn how it felt to touch
And resume our separate days in shirts and trousers,
Like hazmats against the sun and its longing,
The moon with its underbelly pulls.
Matt Bryden
Now a blanket is spread, offerings
of chutney and shin bones,
a taper held to the fire
that heats the tar beneath our boats.
Kit Duke
I didn’t know then,
moving for a mouth
that refused to yield an inch,
what it wasn’t.
Janet Hatherley
In my cookery exam, we have to prepare a family meal This is summer and Mum can’t put out her trot line with its hooks because of swimmers so I buy three mackerel from the fishmonger. I cycle to the school bus stop one arm on the handlebar,...
Jane Ayres
& my sub-tropical heart
will punctuate the idea of treacling hope
puncturing the sense of a book
Annette Iles
across the street
I am washed off my feet
my heart
splashes up into pieces
Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig
Dusk is dancing & all the visual technologies at hand feel
overwhelmed: mobile eye, pit pastels, graphic card.
It’s down to language, then, imagine.