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.
Ian Badcoe
We are eating dessert when the urge overcomes her
to scrawl mathematics, the night ticks on
Sim Pereira-Madder
Tom Giles once asked me if I had tools and at that
time I didn’t because I was fifteen maybe sixteen
Molly Knox
I count:
four cows in the meadows. Made
friends with them this Spring.
Pascal Vine and – – – ajae – – – for our Invisible and Visible Disabilities Feature
Chronic fuck slug
Chronic floor sleeping
Chronic fist seething
Chronic food swallowing
Chronic feuding skin
Chronic foreseen surrender
Chronic failure synonym
Chronic sel(f)-inlictednes(s)
Chronic found inner-piece(s)
Chronic forcibly sending love (&) (kisse(s))
Chronic we (f)ucking mi(s)s you
– Pascal Vine
breaking through the battering lashings of exhaustion and overwhelm,
a quiet, passionate voice buds within you.
it exasperatingly sprouts and presses and pouts, saying:
“we’re forever dogged!
it’s forever dusk!
our soul’s been over-tillaged!
you’re becoming but a husk!
we need a rest
we need a break please!
our brittle bones are steeped in ache.”
– – – ajae – – –
Ellie Spirrett and Erin Coppin for our invisible and visible disabilities feature
This is the first time you have been out in three weeks.
Today sits like a joker between diamonds. Your punctured
skin sags over your bones, and you have dragged it
dangerously down the tarmac to mine this charity
shop for new parts.
– Ellie Spirrett
the riding of bikes
the rhythm of legs
the wind-driven tears
the wobbling turns
the handlebarred bags
the motion, the motion
-Erin Coppin
Will Snelling
The garden shudders, brushed with ice,
its edges slightly blurred away
by cloud unfolding over the grass.
Jonathan Croose
The gravel drive seems longer now,
the knock feels like a split of skin
and out on the fen road, by now there are chalk marks,
diagrams and calculations, cones and contraflows,
plastic zips and silent spinning lights.
No more need for sirens there,
but here, here on the doorstep, every alarm must ring.
Gordon Scapens
Hid some between hearing
and interpretation,
made a new alphabet.
Hid some between wit
and pedantic speeches
to fool anyone listening.
Gary Jude
The mandibles look like the tusks
of some gigantic bull elephant bagged
by hunters posing for a photograph
in pith helmets next to a tent
and a wind up phonograph.