Today’s choice
Previous poems
Carolyn Oulton
Autumn Fires
Unexpected as burned stone,
what am I supposed
to do with this memory?
The sudden shuffle of ash,
flames clicking like needles,
grey-cold flags. You there
just now – I can’t be sure
– perhaps about to be?
5 a.m., still curved
like wax on a bottle.
I don’t hear the taxi,
then he’s gone. I’m standing
by the window now,
a boy walks through the rain.
In the kitchen a girl, not well,
strokes her paints on water.
After lunch, rain clings
to the gutters.
A moment and a log
falls sharply, knocking smoke
across the room.
Already I know the grass
is wet outside the window.
Who it is I’m waiting for.
Carolyn Oulton is a Professor of Victorian Literature at Canterbury Christ Church University. She teaches on the Creative and Professional Writing BA and is Project Co-Lead for https://kent-maps.online/. Her most recent poetry collection is Accidental Fruit (Worple). @writing_at_CCCU
Chrissy Banks
. . . Yes, I’ve tasted pomegranates
and I know what they do. The sense of vertigo:
happily dizzy at first, as if you’ve downed
a bottle of Shiraz or Merlot. You live by night . . .
Jenny Hockey
I knew the earth rolling by
was red, smelt its tang on the wind,
felt woods weighing green
Karen Luke
My sister’s father wound is the flush cut
on the bark where she lost her foothold
and fell,
the trunk burning red between her thighs
all the way down the tree to the ground…
Suzanna Fitzpatrick
Half five. The sky thickens to darkness
through the grime on the tall windows,
the claw marks of rain. Someone whistles
in the corridor…
Robin Vaughan-Williams
Something is pulling at my T-shirt.
Something is holding my hand.
I can feel it walking beside me…
Chen-ou Liu
snow crystals
on my neighbor’s windows …
Foreclosure askew
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