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.
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...
Jenny Pagdin
Before the market town with the Pepper Pot building and the concrete bus station and its standing water, we were Hampshire, Beirut and Freetown with neat shelves of Vimto, ivory, Milupa, of Milton, tie-dyes, pink almonds and sugarcane. I picture...
John Grey
In the Line Up It's beginning to rain. Just drizzle now but who knows what that portends. And there's no shelter. But at least we're moving, slowly to be sure, but forward. "What's this line for?" I ask the guy in front of me. Not that I'm curious...
Tom Wiggins
A Present for Cat If I could send you the perfect present it would be a box with the words DELICIOUS VICTORIA SPONGE CAKE on the front and when you open that box it would reveal another box with the words FEROCIOUS SCORPION!!! written across it...
Stephen Lightbown
Everyone Welcome I sit at the back of class, behind rows of people in padmasana. Legs crossed on their mats. I stay in my chair. I’m not everyone. I haven’t taught anyone in a chair before, says the teacher. I assume you know what you’re doing....
Marguerite Doyle
Lunchbreak She slips away from fire and steel, each dip of the paddle a balm for tension at the surface. She steers a course beyond the rocks, slow in the heavy water that still smarts with April’s chill and with the poise of someone at ease with...
Lisa Lopresti
The Ultimate Question the best answer is from Bob Mortimer and 2 Babybells he transmogrified their red wax coats with a flaming serviette, winding a wick as a beacon light with pocket cheese to sustain you during the realisation that many...
Marc Janssen
Shasta You can stand on red banks like a brilliant tree Breathe toward the summit; You can descend like an avalanche. The mountain will not reject you The mountain might eat you alive But it will not reject you The mountain might turn you over The...
Rachel Coventry
A Cell My heart, that scrappy little jail and inside it, you sitting there dejected growing more yellow and gaunt by the day. (I saw your thing on Instagram.) I would like to release you, but can’t the doors don’t work that way. If there is a key,...