Today’s choice
Previous poems
Kate Bailey
Us and Them
They’ve mended the park fence again,
patched it over with the usual ugly metalwork,
like a riot barricade.
That’ll keep them out –
the delinquents,
the ne’er-do-wells,
who break in and sit on the grass in the dark
and watch the moon,
the dirty buggers!
Next week it will be prised away
to leave a gap the width of a person.
Another incursion.
And those scum-of-the-earth
lying under softly budding trees,
counting the stars.
Kate Bailey is a violinist, but she has always loved words. She has two grown-up daughters, and lives in Oxford with her husband and pacifist cat. Her writing has been published in the Frogmore Papers and the Fish anthology.
Robin Houghton
I’m looking through a lattice of magnolia
not yet ready to blow open its thousand furring buds—
every year the same urgency—
Lesley Graham
I like soft grass, the sort you see
in early spring sprouting from
improbable interstices,
Robert Nisbet
Our family does weddings.
When Rosalie married, first time round,
and the cars assembled for the drive,
it was in fact a lovely sunrise…
Amirah Al Wassif
I know a fig tree walks in beauty singing a fair song as soon as my heart beats.
She uses elevators & electric stairs
Royal Rhodes
Halfway within
the sheltering woods
you found yourself.
Claire Walker
we are holding each other so we don’t forget
the way water holds us.
Sue Spiers and Mike Huett for Day Three of our Archive Feature
You will need four hundred items in the stew of her:
cumin, lemon, colocynth, bitter apple, lime, broccoli
to get the aftertaste she would want in your memory.
– Sue Spiers
It took years to piece events
together; hushed voices, evasions,
or little glances…
– Mike Huett
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.