Today’s choice
Previous poems
Magnus McDowall
Seven Sisters Road
We rolled out on Seven Sisters Road,
two crates of Tyskie empty in my stairwell.
We were talking from the chest, walking backwards
crackling air above our heads like streetlights
beatboxing, spitting Maccies adverts at us
sounds of microwaves and ice cream makers,
night producing jitters in security guards
and a backing track to later chatting up
the leng ones round a table, telling them
we’re long-term ones, wealthy ones, footballer ones
before another pack walk in with their 501s,
Air Force Ones, giving worse grief to the cashier –
nights like these have a habit of splitting into shards.
Cleaved apart by a comment or a look that leaves
you picking up the shrapnel of a headbutt from the pavement
explaining to the officer that it wasn’t your lot who started it.
In the morning you’ll glue the muddle into a mosaic, imagining
steel in the space where your spine might have been.
Magnus McDowall is a poet from London. His poems have appeared in magazines, films, festivals and this campaign for Queens Park Rangers Football Club. His reviews can be found at Writers Mosaic, a division of the Royal Literary Fund.
Ash Bowden
Out again with the pitchfork churning
compost into the old green bin, stinking
and silent as an ancient earthen vat.
Mallika Bhaumik
This is not a frilly, mushy love letter
to a city whose allure lies in defying all labels and holding the mystery key to a man’s heart, though none has ever been able to lay an absolute claim on it,
Jena Woodhouse
Around midnight, the hour when pain
reasserts its dominance, a voice
behind the curtain screening
my bed from the next patient’s:
an intonation penetrating abstract thoughts
Kate Bailey
They’ve mended the park fence again,
patched it over with the usual ugly metalwork,
like a riot barricade.
Ibrar Sami
Across the barren land
where blood once played its savage Holi,
the fearless migratory birds
have returned again.
Anyonita Green
It wobbles slightly, red wine jelly.
I peer at it, nose close enough
to smell the iron, the scent of coagulant,
inhaling through slightly parted lips
Soledad Santana
Seen as she’d hung her cranial lantern
from the roof of her step-father’s garden shed,
the parabolic formula was skipped; like two calves, we followed the fence
to the end of the foot-ball pitch.
Claire Harnett-Mann
Behind the block, the night tears in scrub-calls.
Fox kill scores the morning,
ripped by prints in muck.
Hedy Hume
Stepping into the opposing seat
I smile, and the look I receive
Makes me feel the antisocial one.