Today’s choice
Previous poems
Chrissy Banks
Some of This Is True
Sun comes out, my body opens
all its folding doors, its windows.
Sun comes out, my body floats –
like feather, cirrus, floats across the grass.
Sun comes out. Under the apple tree
in the hammock, my body lays me down.
Sun comes out, my body sighs –
or purrs maybe – yes purrs.
My love returning home comes wandering
to where my body stretches out..
He brings me mango juice
brings plump black cherries.
He strokes the fur on my arm.
Chrissy Banks lives in Exeter and co-hosts Uncut Poets. The Uninvited is available from Indigo Dreams and Frank, from Smith/Doorstop. She won third prize in the Bridport Poetry Competition 2024. She has been published in Penumbra, Frosted Fire and Under the Radar.
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.
Antony Owen
Twenty- something sex are bodies.
thrown down like sophomore prose.
Martin Mooney
The footbridge was skinned in graffiti – slogans, threats,
declarations of love, swastikas. Grek. Kost. Lapse.
Aardhra Chandran
Canvas boots, pig-iron tacks.
At midnight, the wooden platform groans like a hull.