Today’s choice
Previous poems
Regina Weinert
Shared Attic
A key on a short string unlocks
a metal door to an unlit stair, steep
wooden steps, a turn at the top
where you can’t see back. We’re in The Gods.
A warren on the right, murk-bound filaments
of light strike coal briquettes, a broom lurks.
On the left, a breathless empty stage,
unsettled dust, the roof’s raw underside.
We unwind our frayed washing rope.
The drying floor is warm like baking,
the rafters smell of vanilla, sweeter
where diamonds of sunlight magnify the grain.
The skylights are half-closed, the traffic hums
and drums. My mother has a far-away look.
I offer her pegs from a bowl.
There’s room up here to hang the bedding,
she straightens all the edges. I slink along
a corridor of sheets, not touching.
Regina Weinert lives in Sheffield. She has had a university career in language and linguistics. Her poems are also published by e.g. Magma, The North, Pennine Platform, Poetry Salzburg Review, Stand, Under the Radar and Wild Court.
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.
Jason Lovell
While children kneel at your cage in awe
edge offerings of cashew nuts, chopped fruit,
curse words into your magnificent beak,
mums settle carrier bags at tired wet feet
Elijah MacBean
My Name is My Name Ami never let anyone call my sister Sam – it always had to be Samina. She said she’d rather be waterboarded than let her daughter be whitewashed by whites too conservative to spare the extra syllables. Ami never let anyone call...
Damen O’Brien
The coastline’s smile is sharp with blackened teeth,
seabird shelters, scarps, cutaways, broken reefs:
the bloody mouth of a boxer who can’t be dropped,
punch drunk with the brain’s purple pounding . . .
Gwil James Thomas
Terrestrial locomotion
across concrete,
the inverted pendulum,
moving flesh and boot –
Royal Rhodes
The passenger train along the Connecticut shoreline moves as if in a
river of wooden ties and steel rails. . .
Neil Elder
There are blackbirds singing beautifully at dawn,
Mozart and Shakespeare existed and that’s fine . . .