Today’s choice
Previous poems
Angela France
What was Lost
Something black is humped
far ahead on the path.
Perhaps some small creature fallen
from where it should be. I am unsure
whether I saw it move.
Once I found a fledgling crow on the pavement,
lifted it to a low branch on the tree above.
Its claws gripped my hand, would not let go
while it shrieked distress at my human touch
and adults wheeled overhead, rusty screeches
trembling the leaves and scratching my ears
in outrage at my interference.
Now I see it is a leather glove on the path
rain-sodden and mud-spattered.
Its fingers creased, where knuckles
bent, arching the back into a hump.
It’s a large glove, stitching split along the thumb.
It would fit a big hand, a strong hand,
a glove worn to dig a trench or hold a ladder-rung.
The creased wrist brushes against a tweed sleeve
or peeps from a pocket, the material frayed on a lapel,
tobacco-scented and scratchy against my cheek.
Angela France has had poems published in many of the leading journals and has been anthologised a number of times. Her fifth collection, Terminarchy, came out July 2021 with Nine Arches Press. Angela teaches at the University of Gloucestershire and in various community settings. She runs a reading series in Cheltenham, ‘Buzzwords’.
Chloe Hanks
the feminine urge to bleed
all over the bedsheets, to refuse
to grow his babies, to abandon your
responsibilities, to forget to buy his toothpaste,
to move everything on his desk an inch to the left,
Avaughan Watkins
and waves jumped like giddy children
onto the stones.
Jellyfish loomed, a cove of beached moons.
You stood in your room for hours
a rock pool
waiting for the sea to hold you
Maggie Mackay
Daddy’s girl, always. Tea done, you fetch Glen’s lead and we climb the hill to the spread of The Links. We talk. It’s as if we have met in a previous life, the click – you, a pipe smoking fan of Bertrand Russell, always think, think, and think the eternal puzzles of existence. Our walks are adventures in language, in invention, a form of The Great Egg Race without eggs.
Sarah Nabarro
Your smile
Woke something –
Up.
If you knew,
Mike Wilson
My reptilian brain calculates the minimum I’ll do to escape
the weight of obligation …
but before I finish the math, we regress into college kids
rushing the street Julia barricades with furniture
to keep out the law by breaking the law.
Allyson Dowling
Night drops by
In a coat of onyx and blue
Lights up his silver pipe
And asks how do you do…
Emily Veal
boudicca you’re a brewery down the road i drank a bottle of your finest on the train back from bury st edmunds the red queen (no one will call you ginger) i see you everywhere realised you were also the wetherspoons round the corner the one with...
Lesley Burt
tongue it various from burr to babel swish to swirl
rushes between buttresses plaits threads of currents
where swans lord-and-lady-it along the centre
trips over own flow with
fish-out-of-water flash salmon’s silver high-jump
Sam Szanto
This love was. Slowly it becomes formless,
drifting, softening, snakeskin-empty,
the part it has played in who I am now
secreted in a pocket of a coat