Today’s choice
Previous poems
Mary Mulholland
Red as a fairytale
Who will pick the apples now she’s gone?
Orchards of eaters, cookers, some red-fleshed
that she’d harvest and lay on racks,
then gather those on the ground, struggle
down with bag-loads to dump on my doorstep.
No note. As if they’d blown here. Windfalls.
Just cut away the bad bits, she’d say
if I rang, and I’d stew them to a pale pulp,
pinkish if any were red to their core.
Red was her colour: flamboyant dresses,
fandango-dancing, castanet-snapping,
painted nails, laughing scarlet lips.
Welcome to the House of Fun says a poster
still hanging in the dark of her hall.
Mary Mulholland’s poems are published most recently in Mslexia, Magma, Aesthetica, The Interpreter’s House, and forthcoming in Stand and Pomegranate London.. She has a pamphlet from Live Canon and another forthcoming from Broken Sleep. www.marymulholland.co.uk
Anna Saunders
One touch and you Become it Playtime in the streets. All of you in a line, behind a Wolf who has his back to you. What time is it Mr Wolf? Four o'clock! He shouts without turning. You let another little girl or boy, too eager for their own good,...
Ozge Gozturk
I Draw a Line of fire and blood, of ants running in horror, a line of broken windows, locked doors, of size four school shoes with shiny bows, a line of thunder and lightning falling into the living room of our so-called home, a line of frightened...
Sophia Rubina Charalambous
Nightcrawler Your black eyes, black as the void that surrounds us, stare back at me, so black they catch any trickle of light, the time on the radio, the table lamp, the crack between curtains that let the day in prematurely. They are my eyes,...
Emma Simon
Indoor Cloudspotting Yesterday was leadbellied. Bearing down not floating away. A sense of nimbostratus gathering shadows outside the kitchen windows. You tick the box marked ‘chance of rain’. We’re classifying drift, tabulating it into neat...
Eve Chancellor
Two Girls on a Greyhound The older girl turns her face towards the window. Hides behind her curtain of long brown hair. Her sister is asleep. They are never going back there. Stepping off the coach, the seat of the young girl’s jeans is...
Ross Thompson
Errata A boy at school liked to collect the broken nibs of pencils: dozens of fractured graphite tines he kept inside a secret compartment in a carved wooden case. They rattled in his bag as he walked: a constant reminder of shoddy penmanship, of...
Dillon Jaxx
fossil fast forward a million years or seven ice cream sticky fingers picking up the shell of me nestled in the sputum on the beach tilting me this way and that looking for angles tracing ice cream fingers through the ess that housed my spine look...
Adrija Ghosh
your flesh is an abacus. i touch every crumb of the morning on you dust it off part you open real slick slow my fingers knead the hard math of you, the science your goosebumps, my abacus beads that substitutes logic. you rosary between my fingers,...
Maggie Harris
If I was that woman If I was that woman. If I was that woman in the big house with the tall windows like eyes staring across open farmland where the late afternoon sunset glazes the manicure of her lashes. If I was that woman whose Italian...