Today’s choice
Previous poems
Elaine Baker
To my Ovaries
My cahoonas. My muscular daisies.
Potent white olives. You make me sick.
My mute twins on tricycles. Femme fatales.
Relay racers. Nightmares wished upon stars.
In my brain you’re pendula on speed.
My climax on the horror film screen.
You are landmines inside me,
birth and death simultaneously,
two tickers, with all a heart’s grief,
none of its mercy. You’re mad for procreation.
You’re my future on the run.
My past gunned down in the street.
Elaine Baker is the author of poetry chapbooks: Dancing in Babylon, Winter with Eva (both V Press) and five-point-palm (Red Ceilings Press). She lives in the wilds of Norfolk. Find her on X @kitespotter, Instagram @elainebaker76 and at: www.elaine-baker.com
Martin Fisher
Inside, in the half-light, the iron rot took hold.
Forgotten service–obsolete.
Salt-coin neglect.
The money flowed inland,
Moored on an hourglass choke.
No one told the sea.
Craig Dobson
Out of morning
a misted light,
glowing fire
in the air.
Steven Taylor
A very long time ago
Stephen Fry’s godfather, the
Justice, Sir Oliver Popplewell
Who chaired the inquiry
Into the Bradford City
Amirah Al Wassif
Beneath my armpit lives a Sinbad the size of a thumb.
His imagination feeds through an umbilical cord tied to my womb.
Now and then, people hear him speaking through a giant microphone—
Singing,
Cracking jokes,
Mark Smith
In the portacabin that morning, men smoked
and looked at last week’s paper again.
There was no water to fill the urn.
The first job – to get connected
Toby Cotton
A blustery day –
the wind too strong for kites
or for lifts to the sky.
“To a thoughtful spot,” it cites
and pins me to the earth.
Ansuya Patel
except this burnt red vase.
Hand shaped in the muffled roar,
devouring flame in the furnace’s mouth.
Hannah Ward
Look, Drew, the
plums are in
pieces beneath
us. I dreamt:
Andrea Small
a flower is not a heron
does not stand on one leg
spear-billed over golden carp