Today’s choice

Previous poems

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,
carrying my ingredients
in a square biscuit tin
under my other arm.

In the cookery room
I slit the fish open,
bright-eyed, translucent 
green and silver,
tip the guts and
maroon hearts
into the bin.

I scrape off the scales
with a blunt knife, 
place the fish under the grill.

On the plate
I pipe mashed potato
around them
in rosettes.

My cookery teacher is pleased.
I come first in the exam.

 

Janet Hatherley’s pamphlet, What Rita Tells Me, and collection, On the road to Cadianda, were published by Vole.  She has poems in magazines, including Culture Matters and Ink Sweat and Tears, winning 1st prize in Enfield poetry competition, 2025.  @JanHatherley

Lesley Burt

There’s a house in a suburb of between-the-wars pebble-dash & bay windows, where the soundtrack is sighs, tuts & bellows, the clash of plates & jangle of cutlery.

Gemma Blakeley

My Dad Complains That The Hedges Are Overgrown

and the word bemuses me, implying as it does
the concept of excess in what can only be good.

Nick Cooke

Molluscous receivers, would that you could
turn your talents inwards, and pick up
all that goes on in the cerebral swamp . . .

Siân Bentham

She doesn’t know what she is doing.
She chops and boils, snacks and sneezes, sits.
Classical radio plays, imbuing
the scene with comic dignity and wit.