Today’s choice
Previous poems
Irene Cunningham
LULLABY of CALMING – Do you take spec in your tea?
Lavender seeps. I expect my limbs to leaden, lead the body down through sheet, mattress-cover, into the machinery of sleep where other lives exist. Landscapes of folding dimensions intermingle at the drop of an eyelid. Alice meets Titania for lunch with crisp white wine instead of tea. Fizzing accents discuss our failings to hold the world in high esteem – it takes a lifetime to grow into a life, carry the bad, live like glorious humans. Some enchanted future morning I’ll wake, be enamoured by a rose bush tapping at the window, bluest sky behind. I’ll have forgotten who or what I was. A smiling someone will open my door with, Lovely morning. I’ll feel loved. They’ll place a little table on my knees with food waving its aroma. I’ll grasp the fork, pierce lumps of scrambled egg with rolling hills of melted cheese and clap hands as I finish. The daily wandering down corridors peering into paintings means it’ll take forever to mingle in that pleasant state of decay.
Irene Cunningham has poems in many magazines, anthologies over decades. 2019 Hedgehog Press published, SANDMEN: A Space Odyssey, poetry conversation. 2020 FIONA WAS HERE: Amazon. 2022 Dreich Press, No Country for Old Woman. 2023 Amazon: Talking to Walls, and Up@Ground Level.
Stuart Charlesworth
Hello, I’ve crafted myself a god from the kind of modelling clay you fire in your kitchen oven. I can lift my god with my hands, carry god around. Look, my god has fourteen heads, each one mounted on its own elegant neck — fourteen necks rising...
Anna Blasiak translates Robert Kania
I saw I saw American night in broad daylight I saw houses worth millions of dollars and houses without windows on the outskirts Detroit I saw my ancestors’ American dream several Mexicans cleaning in a hotel where I danced YMCA at a wedding...
Graham Clifford
Revivifying Bees in the PRU* (*Pupil Referral Unit) A tennis racquet leaves a waffle imprint on the forehead of the boys that get too close. The Jackson 5 at full blast at 08:45 bounces off the Georgian townhouses that surround the PRU. This...
Louise Devismes
fish! that year, the summer was nosebleeds and candy apples. none of our clothes fit us anymore — our bellies burst with fruit and sugar and all the sun we could swallow. we scratched mosquito bites the size of grapes until yellow scabs peeled off, our...
Millie Godwin
Tendril Tongues Why do I keep trying to rekindle old flames when I’ve told her time and time again that a relit cigarette just doesn’t taste the same Willow Becomes Butterfly Our love flows heavy then lingers like tired...
Alice Neal
Helen (Mother) My mother was alone when she gave birth, save for the flocks of anonymous doctors who removed me from her bloodied womb with spears and forceps, whilst my father marked her agony with stains on the bar. When I arrived late, pink,...
Jessica Mayhew
Clippers We took turns on the wooden chair, feet bare-soled on the kitchen tiles, head bent forward as if in prayer, the old towel around your shoulders. As the clippers purred, nape to crown, I folded each of your ears in turn, while outside, beyond our...
L Kiew
You who stand in the red dust know that frogs no longer croak for rain. Bare ground cracks across remains of drains, windows in the taman-taman gape-broken and houses semi-detach, uprooting terraces. Absence is only flaking paint. Blown away are...
Charlie Baylis
finally i’m annoyed enough to write a poem i sit & eat in the vietnamese restaurant long enough to feel annoyed a man is stroking a cat in the doorway i order the number 4 and watch katie cook the chicken on the grill finally i’m annoyed...