Today’s choice
Previous poems
Ian C. Webb
Finistère
June 23rd – 24th, 2016
Two table’s worth of no-longer strangers
at dusk on a lane of nautical miles,
basket of bread, bottles of wine, talk of home
and places called home; watching the beams
of the continent’s light, see a lava-red sun
shrink to a flame at the earth’s ‘very edge’ —
edge of Ostrava, Riga, Leipzig, Graz.
At 5.00 a.m. news from home on every screen;
I wipe the sleep from the blink of an eye,
my shoulders slumped on the rail of the deck —
see the creature’s strut, its busy beak,
obsessed, obnoxious, the ruler of waves.
I am buried at sea, consigned to a martial,
barnacled, wreck; a grubby ghost, I stink of the past.
Ian C. Webb lives in Yorkshire. Recently graduated from the University of York with an M.A. in Poetry & Poetics, his work has appeared in Poetry Salzburg Review, Cathexis North-West Press, French Literary Review, Snakeskin and The Charles Carter.
Kit Duke
I didn’t know then,
moving for a mouth
that refused to yield an inch,
what it wasn’t.
Janet Hatherley
In my cookery exam, we have to prepare a family meal This is summer and Mum can’t put out her trot line with its hooks because of swimmers so I buy three mackerel from the fishmonger. I cycle to the school bus stop one arm on the handlebar,...
Jane Ayres
& my sub-tropical heart
will punctuate the idea of treacling hope
puncturing the sense of a book
Annette Iles
across the street
I am washed off my feet
my heart
splashes up into pieces
Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig
Dusk is dancing & all the visual technologies at hand feel
overwhelmed: mobile eye, pit pastels, graphic card.
It’s down to language, then, imagine.
Antony Owen
Twenty- something sex are bodies.
thrown down like sophomore prose.
Martin Mooney
The footbridge was skinned in graffiti – slogans, threats,
declarations of love, swastikas. Grek. Kost. Lapse.
Aardhra Chandran
Canvas boots, pig-iron tacks.
At midnight, the wooden platform groans like a hull.
Jason Lovell
While children kneel at your cage in awe
edge offerings of cashew nuts, chopped fruit,
curse words into your magnificent beak,
mums settle carrier bags at tired wet feet