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.
Nicole Knoppová
Mami, I find myself wishing your memory
were a bird of prey—
red-tailed hawk or black vulture . . .
Ali Murphy
One Winter’s Line
Between underpants and saggy bra,
she hangs her fallopian tubes out to dry.
Harry Gunston
night knocks inside my dream
at the end of the world
death house
where sawdust covers everything.
Isobel Williams
If you’re asking how to get invited
To draw at a sex club . . .
Clare Currie on Mother’s Day
After learning about the maternal instincts of seals, I took to listing postpartum offensives
Charlie Hill
What was he running from?
Well what have you got:
the blood-soaked news of course,
theme parks, leaf blowers, HR,
but also the language . . .
Jane Wilkinson on International Women’s Day
Queen Conch
My spirit animal is a sovereign sea snail. A part-time anchoress,
anchored to her cell.
Jenny Moroney
Clogged heavens
the aeroplanes criss-cross through
what was imagined there
Marc Janssen
Took a needle to a dictionary.
It dispersed like confetti . . .