Today’s choice
Previous poems
H.J. Thomas
Black Cherry Ice Cream
We ate it leaning against the rail
above the harbour –
black cherry,
melting down the cone
faster than we could catch it.
And you laughed,
mouth red,
sunlight flaring in your lashes.
I watched the boats move below us –
slow beasts with canvas wings –
and thought:
this is joy.
Not fireworks,
not promises,
not certainty.
Just you,
offering me a bite
from your side
of the cone.
And the sweetness –
sharp and floral,
ripe as August before it turns.
H.J. Thomas is a poet based in Durham, UK. His work explores grief, queerness, and hope. He is working on his first collection, still here, and a second, Songs of Vancouver Island. Previously unpublished.
Kate Hendry
So what if there’s a dead patch.
Remember the havoc
unfettered fire makes –
Christtie Jay
My Lord, let the record show
she remembered everyone else
before this. If you must, take her
in teaspoons
May Grier
I wasn’t to know
that it was a three-tusked
beast; that there was not one,
not two, but three
that grew the seed of me.
Daniel Hill
On her first day home, she took
to plucking the sky with tweezers—
latched on to clouds and waited
Sheila Saunders
Which is the subject?
Limp-leaved yucca
reluctantly dying,
the foreground figure
in its stony pot?
Trelawney
What is holding you back from building your wormery?
You can’t say there isn’t the time. Everyone has the time
when it comes to a wormery. Born with the right tools to hand.
David Van-Cauter
…4am and the birdsong begins, a wet January in a new city and I’m alone watching a man in Minnesota, murdered for protecting a woman from a fascist hit squad. . .
Tim Dwyer
Unexpectedly
My neighbour
opens her window
for fresh salty air
Paul Moclair
Their shore leave over,
. . . the spirits of the dead are bid farewell
until that time next year, when ritual
grants them reprieve again.