Today’s choice
Previous poems
Hilary Thompson
Hot Cross Buns
Ambling up North Street
on a Saturday afternoon
at the end of a long Winter,
I am stopped by two women,
elderly, smiling eyes and mouths,
lip-sticked, offering an open pack
of hot cross buns from the NISA shop
down the road. The shorter of the two
with red hair folded back behind her head
says: would you like a hot cross bun, dear?
I look, smile back at the kind offer and say:
thank you but I’m gluten free.
She looks me straight in the eye, holds me there
for a long moment and says: Jesus still loves you, dear.
Thank you, I say, still smiling.
Hilary Thompson writes poetry as an everyday occupation.
Sandra Noel
The tide unpleats from her godet,
zig-zags in running stitch
round the base of the côtil.
Matthew Caley
supposedly: if I am to render
‘a man’ then
this ‘man’ must I guess resemble me‹›
Jenny Robb
The nun in charge of the children is thin, her back straight as punishment.
Ken Evans
You try doing star-jumps, steps,
or squats, in knee-high wellies.
Joe Williams
I was born in a town of shadows.
Anne Symons
She was only a little woman
five feet nothing in nylon stockings.
‘If I stood sideways they’d mark me absent.’
Ben
When she said ‘could’, it was clearly in italics
and when she said ‘one day’, the creak of glaciers
shuddered around its edges.
Dragana Lazici
the days are long but the years are short.
seconds are tiny kitchen knives in my back.
i stopped reading Dickinson, her voice is a sad parrot.
Abigail Ottley
Faces, unless they come swimming up close. are a blur of piggy-pink and ice-
cream. In the street, she doesn’t know, cannot be certain when to smile, when to
look away