Today’s choice

Previous poems

Rhian Thomas

 

 

 

Undertow

 

On my phone a newsreel shows a car boot lifting
just above the flood. Tail lights like eyes
caught in a comic gasp, while its body, like the carriageway,
lies under sixty million litres of last night’s rain.
Walking through town we find the storm has coughed
up through the tarmac on Brick Row again, drivers
glaring blame as they edge what’s left. They’re calling it
unsettled weather, but watching the floodstream push
through clods of muck like it always did
it’s the bricks that look presumptuous. At night
I dream roads winding under water. Concrete like flaking skin
or weed rising in glass-green depths. Scan through the earth’s crust
you’ll find tectonic graveyards, plates you might have mapped
in earlier oceans, landmasses in ribbons – now continents
of subducted fragments stirred in magma. We turn,
maps metamorphose with exhumed rock
like floodwaters that wash away the borders and the checkpoints.
The current of the road rushing out to meet all debris,
all small boats buoyed by nothing
but hope magnetised in a planet’s undertow.
Rhian Thomas has been shortlisted for the New Welsh Review’s Borzello Prize and the Laurie Lee Prize. Her work has appeared in publications including Poetry Wales, The New Welsh Review, Planet, IS&T, the Alchemy Spoon and the Gentian Journal.

Sylvia Banham

Pigeons have invaded the garden, two then four, then a flock.
They roost in the apple tree to nest, reconnoitre or mate
 
ignore my sorties to deter them and shit without stint
on patio and herb bed, foul lovely hyssop and thyme.

Gordon Vells

Impotent in family life and ineffectual at work,
sometimes he would spend a full quarter-hour
just circulating the mini-roundabout on his moped,
dizzy from the power of blocking everyone else.

Patrick Wright

i protest     say how when i’m gone i’d like to rest before the choice to return & go through 
all this again     you sigh as though that’s absurd & endings are just endings     we’re mulch 
& nothing but endless fucking 

Francis de Lima

Oh London. U useless city. Map to

                                                                        nowhere land. Tight stretch 

                                                                        open eye. The underground metal. 

The night tube. The railway. Smog

Over coaltrip. The presence

                                                                          Of machine upon machine. U