Today’s choice
Previous poems
Bel Wallace
Interior
My dear, I washed you out of my sheets.
And now I sleep softly in them.
My dreams are sweet and free.
I opened the windows to air out
your smoke. I liked it for a while, how
it held the past in its wispy fingers.
I emptied your cigarette butts
from my ashtray. The Cuban one, heavy.
Remember? It waited a half-life for you.
I scoured your dense coffee
from my cups. You broke one. Elegant,
with painted roses. It doesn’t matter.
I threw away your shoes. Every time,
you left a pair behind, like two footprints
in ancient rocks.
I put back the furniture you’d rearranged,
restored my writing corner. Low sun
streams in, now we’re past the Equinox.
And still, my love, our dead skin cells
persist. We mingle in the house-dust,
dancing in the slow winter sunlight.
Bel Wallace‘s poetry has been short-listed for the Bridport Prize, nominated for the Pushcart and published in a range of journals, most recently Anthropocene, Magma and Under the Radar. She’s trying to finish her first novel, but keeps getting distracted by poetry.
Dechen Shaw
Monks spend days shaping mandalas
with coloured sand in intricate lines
as an offering, then blow them away.
Andrew Cannon
Wait, I’m talking.
It’s my turn.
Be patient.
It takes me a while.
I have to work it out.
Rhian Parker, Madailín Burnhope and mithago on Trans Day of Visibility
Your focused eyes on a box of plantain.
Deep concentration making them filled
more brown than white.
A different mouth asks if they sell iru.
-Rhian Parker
My cockatiel, Pippin, has learned to listen
for that particular resigned sigh of the bus
as it passes the living room window
and shrieks whenever he hears it.
-Madailín Burnhope
you wanna know if it screams like a man or a girl?
i want to rip a throat out
teeth bared
growling
guttural
it builds in the back of my throat
i scream like an animal
sick of losing siblings
-mithago
Chloe Hanks
the feminine urge to bleed
all over the bedsheets, to refuse
to grow his babies, to abandon your
responsibilities, to forget to buy his toothpaste,
to move everything on his desk an inch to the left,
Avaughan Watkins
and waves jumped like giddy children
onto the stones.
Jellyfish loomed, a cove of beached moons.
You stood in your room for hours
a rock pool
waiting for the sea to hold you
Maggie Mackay
Daddy’s girl, always. Tea done, you fetch Glen’s lead and we climb the hill to the spread of The Links. We talk. It’s as if we have met in a previous life, the click – you, a pipe smoking fan of Bertrand Russell, always think, think, and think the eternal puzzles of existence. Our walks are adventures in language, in invention, a form of The Great Egg Race without eggs.
Sarah Nabarro
Your smile
Woke something –
Up.
If you knew,
Mike Wilson
My reptilian brain calculates the minimum I’ll do to escape
the weight of obligation …
but before I finish the math, we regress into college kids
rushing the street Julia barricades with furniture
to keep out the law by breaking the law.
Allyson Dowling
Night drops by
In a coat of onyx and blue
Lights up his silver pipe
And asks how do you do…