Today’s choice
Previous poems
Daniel Cartwright-Chaouki
The Lean-to Glasshouse
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
still
Hearts tongue ferns grow beneath
the dripping tap
And at the end in the damp where
all the water pools at the bottom of the sloping
shingle path
Bricks crumble to dust
Their profile left behind
miniature terracotta towns in relief
Grey plastic sockets intrude
Dried cardoon heads hang upside down
from routed conduit pipe
Loose stacks of brick and timber slats
make staging for rows and rows of potted
plants
This is where things grow
The wind threatens with a conditioned
response
So I cup my hands to catch it
And wait for somebody to say
words like short unexpected illness
And devastating loss
Daniel Cartwright-Chaouki is a gardener and writer from Birmingham, England. He writes about trees and plants (mostly) and people (sometimes) and other unimportant things. His work has featured widely both in print and online.
George Parker
I make broth, feel odd wiping it off your face
moments after swiping through bodies, preferences,
dates. Sunset-orange forget-me-nots mar the napkin cloth
Nicolas Spicer
Paysage Moralisé
There’s more to this three-foot square:
lilac vetch & vermilion
field-poppies, some sort of crucifer . . .
Luke Bateman
Brown limpets with tonsured heads
creeping over the fish-stink isle,
spongy underfoot, seaweed for grass.
Adam Horovitz
Such stillness in the air. The attic window
is a cupped ear set to alert the house to subtle
shifts in atmosphere: auguries; signs; any tiny
notice of cataclysmic change. . .
Jenny Mitchell
What Part of Me? Sun demands a front row seat above the graveyard through the trees when my mother’s placed in soil, surrounded by her friends’ small talk – She must have sent the rays for us. Women in their Sunday best, men in greying suits...
L Kiew
Land has dried its eyes, grown hard
hands and interrogates each arrival:
Where are you from, really from?
David Redfield
If we think we are right
the sun may never set;
Helen Evans
Things I did then that I hadn’t done before
Asked the neighbours if they wanted anything in my online weekly shop and
Bought yeast, flour, long-life milk and 70-per-cent-alcohol hand sanitiser and
Cut my own hair, even the bits round the back I couldn’t see, and
Kirsty Crawford
Elizabeth is hiding in the cupboard under the sink
Small enough to fold between cream cleaner and floor polish
Too big to keep elbows away from wire wool