Today’s choice
Previous poems
Kate Bonfield
May long weekend
Coming home to days of heat
trapped beyond the door, to time skewed
by time away, the house bigger and
smaller than before.
As if magnified, a hornet lies dead
by the baffling window
ridiculously detailed and weightless
in the new breeze, shifting.
Another dies nearby, tightens
to a comma then straightens, repeating
on a Domino’s flyer I use to take it outside.
I doubt it survived there.
This happened another May:
emerging in the old, cold room
taken in by green seen through glass,
the house stuffed solid with the shut-up noise
of their oversized hopelessness.
Kate Bonfield lives and works in Dorset.
Gill Horitz
I woke to workers with blades
along the verge, yellow-jacketed
to signify contracted rights
Anita Karla Kelly, CE Collins, Clare Painter on International Women’s Day
In the beginning of the end she bit the thing she wasn’t meant to bite.
Apple stuck in her throat, one bite taken, then swallowed whole.
Elaine Baker
To my Ovaries
My cahoonas. My muscular daisies.
Potent white olives. You make me sick.
Jan FitzGerald
What is not to love
when you draw back curtains
and taste clouds
in their newness and innocence
Helen Finney
At my feet the window sprawls a view of kneaded land,
craggy baked by the hand of the gods, dusted green
with short bit grass.
Eugene O’Hare
It hasn’t been this bright all year –
the moon’s white scalp, spot-lit,
a head turned away from a thing
the rest of us fear: unearthly dark
Juliet Humphreys
Though I am not a painter
this is to be a portrait
of my parents and my sister.
Julian Dobson
You too I guess
have studied the surviving starlings
as they swoop and whistle
by the snack trailer at Moorfoot
Mark Czanik
I loved the tales Luke told me of starving writers,
and the sacrifices they made following their hearts.
Philip K Dick eating dog food. Bukowski’s candy bars.