Today’s choice
Previous poems
Dave Wynne-Jones
Sonnet
And did she break your heart?
A woman asks, perhaps imagining
A fallen chalice scattering
Fragments about the tiles, only discovered
Days later in corners underfoot.
But there was no suddenness
More a growing sense of doom
A shrivelling of tenderness
The emptiness of a vacated room.
You never choose to love
And when you’ve lost
There’s little left to do
But lick your wounds
Turn the key in the lock.
Dave Wynne-Jones left teaching, gained an MA in creative writing at MMU, then wrote articles for outdoor magazines and organised expeditions for mountaineers. He’s published two books of mountaineering non-fiction, two poetry pamphlets, and poems in anthologies and magazines. www.instagram.com/d.
John Grey
there are some lives
lived poolside
and others that
mostly consist of
a bent back in a field –
Adam Flint
All summer automatic exits remain
open, and no one leaves or boards.
David Van-Cauter
You are pleased to see me
in my gothic T-shirt –
those bats, you say, have been your friends.
Mark Wyatt
yes of course/ it was idyllic, reclining (pint of/ cider in hand) poolside in the harvesting/ sunlight
Catherine Shonack
when confronted with vast, endlessness of the ocean
who wouldn’t go mad?
Ansuya Patel
Women scrape coins from their purse,
count pennies, one lifts up a watermelon
in mid-air like raising a newborn to light.
Pippa Little
a woman’s rage cannot raise the dead
but it may split stone like lightning
Abiodun Salako
a boy grows tired
of dying again and again.
i am building him a morgue
for Thanksgiving.
Patrick Wright
It’s as if the dream
is telling me we are still joined
somehow, despite waking
and me trudging on, even though
your voicemail is off, your locks
changed.