Today’s choice
Previous poems
Samantha Carr
Unexploded Bombs
You became obsessed with nucleated red blood cells when you peeked through an
aperture window at your liquid, viscous nature. You became obsessed with maps
after an unexploded bomb exposed a Second World War timeline fault sleeping in a
garden in your city. Several results on the pathology printout are marked with carets.
The Bomb Book marks the location of dropped devices with sticky red dots.
You don’t have a garden, so you revert to the sanctuary of one of the few places to
survive the Blitz, the cobblestones of the historic Barbican. These are pebbles and
sandstones taken from the riverbed. Edges eroded by centuries of foot traffic, horse-
drawn carriages and even the advent of the modern car, something it was never
designed to sustain. Outside the Admiral MacBride, these stones have
been puked on, fought on, slept on, bled on. How many memories remain in
the sand or have been washed away with the Mayflower Steps and castle
fortifications to rest on Sutton Pool’s harbour floor? Are nucleated red blood cells
dangerous? The GP says it’s not something we normally look at. The internet
says they’re rarely present in healthy adults. The Pathologist says the results should
have been suppressed. You paste your discoveries into the Bomb Book.
Samantha is based in Plymouth, UK, where she is a PhD Creative Writing candidate exploring the lived experience of chronic illness and the healthcare system through prose poetry. She also formerly worked in the NHS as a nurse. Her work has been published in several places, including Arc, Acumen, Ink Sweat and Tears, Mslexia, and Room. In her spare time, she enjoys experimenting with surrealist art. She can be found on Instagram @samc4_rr, and on Facebook @samantha.carr.9275.
Caleb Parkin
Nature Is Healing
It constructs membranes
between its most powerful organs,
filters pathogens hidden in boats.
Sue Butler
When I read my poem about stretch marks
you said it was a funny thing
to write about. I felt a flare,
low down, an orange hazed ember
you’d have to blow into life.
Susan Darlington
. . . On the edge
of sleep it comes snuffling
through leaf litter and we forget
bed; the cold prickling
our bones.
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.