Today’s choice
Previous poems
Ruth Lexton
Watching, January 2021
The new year slouches forward, unlovable,
barely acknowledged but for tired, gritty eyes
and a muffled scream into the kitchen towel.
Pale moonlight streams through the blinds,
watching the night in shiftless wakeful patterns,
patience hardening into endurance as ache into milk.
There’s no forbearance from the Wolf’s Moon
brazenly hanging over rooftops at dawn, flaunting
her silver coin aureole amidst satellite dishes and high wires.
She filters the winter daylight with an ashen smile.
Oceans drag in her wake like the sweep
of a bridal train washing the slagheap of grime.
What happens when she is too jaded to renew the cycle?
What if she decides to finally shake off the tedium
of earthly responsibilities and fling herself up and away
into space, cackling madly, her bald skull shorn of its offices,
glorying in her solitary rampage as she rises up,
shadowless, in the counter-light of the stars?
Ruth Lexton is an English teacher and writer. Her poetry has appeared in Abridged, Shooter, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Drawn to the Light Press, The Alchemy Spoon and London Grip. She won second prize in the Hexham Poetry Competition 2023 and was longlisted for the Aurora Prize 2023.
Chris Kinsey
Chris Kinsey grew up in rural Herefordshire but always wanted to head for the hills in Shropshire and Wales. After a degree in Yorkshire, she settled in Mid-Wales. She’s had five collections of poetry published. Her most recent: From Rowan Ridge was...
Gareth Writer Davies
Gilestone Standing Stone the map tells me not much (there are so many megaliths hereabouts) on the point of giving up there it is three metres tall girthy like a pollarded oak its reason now lost in depopulation maybe it was erected here for its...
B. Anne Adriaens
A child’s coat There’s tiny me on a strip of concrete. There’s the tiny coat I’m wearing, fluffy white: the brightest spot in the image, this coat my mother says she loved, this coat my mother says was so well made, a gift from someone who had...
Pat Edwards
Speaking in code I once heard a man speak in tongues, just sounds like words, but not words. He told us he was filled with the spirit. I once heard remuterations in the air, cirvivulating on the breeze, uncanny in their lisonulance; breathless...
Sophie Diver
Ghost, Moth They want you out of this House of forgotten tea in which you are floating Like a calcium slip This house in which you yield As a sweep of onion skin In old dishwater Disgusted by yourself hollowed out In the flesh of an armchair An...
Oliver Comins
On the Hill No-one has seen me outside the bungalow. I am a rumour behind windows that reflect the sky and reveal nothing of an indoor life. I could pretend there is an extensive lawn in front of me, leading down a gentle slope to a pleached hedge...
Emma Jones
Autumn A sea of firecrackers on spindly fingertips. The wind sails through harmonious foundations. A thunderclap, a secondment of wings, embossed leaves fall like burning fossils. It's the hour for nightingales. Emma Jones is a...
From the Archives: Chaucer Cameron on Halloween
Sunday afternoon there’s always roast dinner. Then mum and dad go to church. The twins stay and wash dishes. Elder-twin picks up a plastic bag with unused Brussels sprouts inside. The cellar door is open.
Jane Ayres
muted tethered i let her touch me without touching me (tears before bedtime) but (listening to the deep ache keeping the things that hurt close closed making space for kinder smotherings) i could never tell you friendship isn’t a consolation prize...