Today’s choice
Previous poems
Regina Weinert
Nothing much
It was the snatch of a dream,
someone said this is not
what you do in the desert,
it was one precise thing, not a list,
and I had to find my way back to it.
They always ask you now, don’t they,
to remember how it felt.
I only heard the words, had no idea
how they matched what I’d done,
something like opening
a door or a window
in a stopped car. I’m practised, so
on waking I saw a British army lorry
on a German country road heading
west. That’s all, because
I don’t go into confined spaces
if I can help it. I’ve learnt not to
from my mother, and to be grateful
for the right Jack and Jock,
Cadbury’s chocolate, understatement.
Regina Weinert grew up in Hamburg, then lived in Edinburgh for many years and now lives in Sheffield. Her poems appear in magazines, e.g. The North, Pennine Platform, Poetry Salzburg Review, Stand, Under the Radar and The Friday Poem.
Paul Stephenson
Long Haul In Buenos Aires, the high-rises are built with stacks of premium steak, while in Patagonia, the killer whales like to beach themselves, Tuesdays at half-past four in the afternoon to play a game of pat-a-cake. Bake me a cake, as slow as...
Tim Kiely
Major Arcana No. XXI: The World You could believe the all is dancing somewhere where the body is not bruised, where hearts are glowing like an earthrise, where all time and time’s losses, all wrongs are resolved in the golden snake that winds...
Louiza Lazarou
From The Last Divided Capital In The World Childhood memories of sandbags, and barrels against barbed wired brick walls barricading the way to the unknown. The spoken of in choked up breaths. Displaced throats echo into mouths born generations...
Dide
A part of my body is dead, hardened and now so hard you could use it as a door knocker or the beak of a woodpecker; it has turned the soot of Black Death, of Shanghai smog; I want to crack a nut on it like a squirrel, parched walnut brains waiting...
Annie Katchinska
Prised Apart I raise my arms and let them slump back down. Maybe they don’t belong to me. Our movements more exhausted, looser Did we show rage. Did we try for once to rest your hands on your hips, hold yourself like a good china cup chipped as...
David Gilbert
The Old Fishing Village The rain is a gauze. I could have slept in, but listen to gulls bothering the cruise ships. What more can rain throw at us? Joe’s boat slips out once a day for weather-beaten tourists who find us on old maps. The yellow houses on...
Anne Caldwell
Wasp’s Nest I wanted to be a goat when I was a child. Agile and cloven- hooved. My days were spent poking cowpats with a stick, sending clouds of bluebottles into the hot sky as the hay meadows chirped with crickets and grasshoppers. One evening...
Bel Wallace
The New Owner Meets The Duende in the Old Barn Last night, in the stone barn behind the house I met a duende, knee-high, Bigfoot stomping, Spluttering gobbledigook. ‘What’s your problem, Duende?’ I asked. Perhaps a touch Patronizing. ‘You, you,...
Rahana K. Ismail
Evening Lists Inadequacies unreels our slippages. My daughter kaleidoscopes supermarket-aisles in the apartment lift monotone. Squirrelling through the doorway, she pictures what to; I don’t....