Today’s choice
Previous poems
Ivan McGuinness
Bourn Identity
Begins
in a bubble
strained by chalk.
Where the brim-full hill cries,
weeping tracks merge
into an idea of brook:
Letcombe,
until merging with Ock.
Earth accommodates to accumulate,
hollows between course, force and resistance.
Pool falls over rock
riffles
into deeper ways,
cress-beds, crayfish, sticklebacks and bullheads.
Wet footed playground,
skirts tucked up
socks rolled on the bank,
ripple and eddy round skinny white legs,
soft silt cushions tender toes,
nets, jam-jars,
magnified beauties of the deep.
In town, domesticated by brick and stone, after grills and races,
a turning wheel catches life out of the stream, grinds free flow
into value.oMill-tailoooowateroooorelaxesooooafteroooowork.
Ivan McGuinness lives in Oxford, his poetry has appeared in several magazines including Seaside Gothic, The Alchemy Spoon and Dream Catcher.
Emily Veal
boudicca you’re a brewery down the road i drank a bottle of your finest on the train back from bury st edmunds the red queen (no one will call you ginger) i see you everywhere realised you were also the wetherspoons round the corner the one with...
Lesley Burt
tongue it various from burr to babel swish to swirl
rushes between buttresses plaits threads of currents
where swans lord-and-lady-it along the centre
trips over own flow with
fish-out-of-water flash salmon’s silver high-jump
Sam Szanto
This love was. Slowly it becomes formless,
drifting, softening, snakeskin-empty,
the part it has played in who I am now
secreted in a pocket of a coat
Ma Yongbo 马永波 and Helen Pletts on World Poetry Day
When you enter mountains, afternoons stretch
and lengthen like days; mesmerise.
下午进山的人都会多活上一天
他们从这山望着更高的山
搓着通红的大手望山气变化
Bel Wallace
Trespasses Forgive me The E flat on your baby grand (not quite in tune). This same finger in the crack that goes clean through the bungalow’s supporting wall. Then flicking dust from the fringed edge of your floral lampshade. Noticing that they...
Arlette Manasseh
You were the pine, softening the dirt I grew up in: the one I climbed in the breeze. Wanting to describe you, I had called you Paulie. That is not your name.
Lynn Valentine
A Bad Spell
The rowan by the house is cracked in two,
her bark ragged, grown good-for-nothing old.
Matt Nicholson
Cousin
I didn’t know who the call was about,
just that it was past my proper bedtime
Karen Hodgson Pryce
All at sea on a serenity of sheep,
we played monopoly, box tatty and frail.
Its missing chance cards, no get-out-of-jail.