Today’s choice
Previous poems
Sheila Saunders
Man in a Room
after Interior at Paddington – Lucian Freud.
Which is the subject?
Limp-leaved yucca
reluctantly dying,
the foreground figure
in its stony pot?
Or the man with a stare
glassy-eyed behind spectacles,
fixed into absence
or challenging the viewer.
He inhabits, but barely, the slovenly mackintosh,
a cigarette hardly held, unlit,
the only suggestion of purpose
his curled fist of yellow fingers.
Can this be a home, sordid,
uncared for, or just a waiting room
where he stands in a purgatorial present?
In fear perhaps of the loiterer under a gas lamp,
boy or man undefined,
seeming absorbed into the street wall,
looking up to the window grille-
– this no protection from the imagined
or real.
Sheila Saunders graduated from St Anne’s College, Oxford, with a degree in English Language and Literature, and since then worked as a reporter on local weekly and daily newspapers in Lancashire, Lincolnshire and Buckinghamshire. She has always loved theatre, music and art, but it is her observation and fascination with her natural surroundings, including the wildlife of the coast, that has inspired most of her poetry. Her poems have been published in journals including As It Ought to Be and Words for the Wild.
Sylvie Jane Lewis
Being quiet and easily tired by being alive among people, I take
the cowardly route to community. I curate a digital garden of oddity.
At best my phone is a menagerie of queers: trinket makers, amateur
playwrights, witches, and, over and over again, my own personal monarchy.
Maryam Alsaeid
Maybe after your bath—
you will sit for a moment,
the towel will hold you close
like a quiet prayer—
Steve Komarnyckyj, Anna Bowles and Lynnda Wardle for Holocaust Memorial Day
where I saw you praying through the angle of the door
Now hangs only in my mind I breathe on its glass wipe away fly specks
Annie Wright
Sing silver times, shimmering columns
of light on the wine-dark, temple
to moon-eyed Hecate, the insatiable.
Magnus McDowall
We rolled out on Seven Sisters Road,
two crates of Tyskie empty in my stairwell.
We were talking from the chest, walking backwards
crackling air above our heads like streetlights
Yucheng Tao
But look here, I turned my head
and discovered the Denver Museum
waiting,
nerve, a soft-boned
species hums
Sarah Boyd
He’s a house of cards, a delicately balanced pyramid
held together by hearing aids and dusty bifocals and
wobbling dentures and ageing pacemaker and
shirt with three buttons missing in action and
Samantha Carr
You became obsessed with nucleated red blood cells when you peeked through an
aperture window at your liquid, viscous nature. You became obsessed with maps
Helen Akers
we’re trying to construct a frame for this
‘highly reactive impulsive emotion’
the nurse is looking into it