Today’s choice
Previous poems
Tamara Evans
Return
Travel West. Submerge yourself
in the M4’s homeward drift.
Remember how
its nightly glow
bewitched the kid
at your bedroom window?
It looked like fire, didn’t it?
Exit at junction 34.
Drop into street view
Follow the lane
down past prickly fields
where swallows zip.
Remember those kids
pulling petals
from clover heads?
Sucking sugar
from each wet tip?
Close your bedroom door.
Listen for tawny owls
and the InterCity.
Watch pipistrelles twist
in the velvet night
like you used to.
As they always did.
You remember, don’t you?
You remember everything.
Tamara Evans’s poems have been published in Poetry Wales and in the Write Out Loud Milestones anthology, and selected to appear on buses in London and Brighton in Poetry on the Buses competitions. Find Tamara on bluesky, instagram.
Clare Currie on Mother’s Day
After learning about the maternal instincts of seals, I took to listing postpartum offensives
Charlie Hill
What was he running from?
Well what have you got:
the blood-soaked news of course,
theme parks, leaf blowers, HR,
but also the language . . .
Jane Wilkinson on International Women’s Day
Queen Conch
My spirit animal is a sovereign sea snail. A part-time anchoress,
anchored to her cell.
Jenny Moroney
Clogged heavens
the aeroplanes criss-cross through
what was imagined there
Marc Janssen
Took a needle to a dictionary.
It dispersed like confetti . . .
Edward Vanderpump
The bridge is beyond the city.
I don’t know anything about the war.
Ships cannot come here on account of the war.
Glenn Hubbard
The cart stands axle deep in seething water.
The blade emerges from the foam, its load
bituminous and black . . .
Kushal Poddar
The child resurfaces.
The morning has no colour yet.
Philip Rösel Baker
He allows the sound to pour
through invisible canals inside his body,
outpacing dull analysis,
quickening cells, illuminating mind,
like blinds lit from within.