Today’s choice
Previous poems
Nairn Kennedy
Portrait
You notice the nose: webbed veins spritzed
with little flicks of red, purple blotches
daubed with a palette-knife, broken ends
where blood-vessels gave up the ghost.
You see the waistcoat bristling
Harris Tweed, the label peeking out just so
we know, and, picked out in gold, a tiny
little compasses-and-square combo
glints in his lapel. You don’t see
the earthy animal smell of the jacket,
the whiff of stale whisky on the breath
where he’s tried to overtake
the Dylan Thomas record. You can’t see
his wife’s face, worn like an overused
tyre, or his children’s eyes blanking
out when his voice is raised.
You only catch a little of the scenes
where he rolls up in the early hours,
hammers on the door with a balled-up
fist, demands a final drink as a nightcap.
He always drives himself home, festering
in a bath of booze; the picture doesn’t show
his kneeling wife, praying for a swerve, a skid,
the sudden emancipation of a brick wall.
Nairn Kennedy’s work has appeared in The London Magazine, Stand, The North, Poetry News and Under the Radar, plus several anthologies. He’s been longlisted in the National, variously commended, and runner-up in the Stanza competition. Website: nairnkennedypoet.co.uk
Ananya S Guha
The leaves are growing out of
a harangue of loneliness
palms cupped I listen to silences
of winter or summers
Peter Leight
Instead of Dying I’m Taking a Trip
to Kansas
where the light appears
as if walking through a gate
in the air
Daniel Cartwright-Chaouki
Its timber frame held together by the waste
of its own decay
The rot a kind of glue undisturbed
Cracked panes of glass hold their fractures
Rosie Jackson
I Am Trying to Love Frank O’Hara More
I really am! I am trying not to see his exclamation marks as cheap melodrama and his endless conjunctions as some kind of separation anxiety or fear of mortality for what do full stops signify except dying
Charlotte Holm, Jennifer A McGowan
A leaky drainpipe drips
creating damp patches on uneven paving,
slime green algae blossoms
forming viridescent ripples
James McDermott
if samsara’s concrete please don’t come back
as black jackal for I live in Norwich
nor spineless worm as I don’t have a lawn
Cheryl Snell, Alice Gregorio, Peter Lilly
I grew up on a farm so I should know all about expensive cows and free milk. You’re taking being a debutante much too literally. We only meant to give permission for you to make a good match, not flit among the suitable boys…
Jade Kleiner
There is the green that birthed all pine trees.
Tom Blake
We were the housing and the housed,
meaning nothing except that
we were always occupied,
or to put it simply never out.