from Testimonies (Scotland 1623 – 1930)
by Hamish Whyte — PAISLEY, 1684 // Margaret Whythill, spouse to James Love, / said she saw James Algie, a merchant, bring his wife / to the close mouth and throw her down / in the strand and saw her rise again
The Friday Poem archive
Wet for Literature
by Devon Webb — I used to go out of my way to get laid / but now I’m lying here on a man’s bed / thirsting for the third instalment in the Magicians trilogy by Lev Grossman / you know like I’m not even that fussed about sex anymore I just wanna read
Visiting David Hockney
by Michael Di Placido — He looks up and half smiles / as I drift in and settle on a chair — / as though I was expected: / “The studio would have to be a riot / of colour with you in it”, I say. / And when I tell him I live near Brid — / not far from his mum's
Epitaphs
by Stephen Payne — TINKER // Despite the name, he worked with several metals. / Despite the name, he worked with craft and care. / Let him forget about the pans and kettles / that all his tinkering could not repair. // TAILOR // Although his future
Phobia
by Nicholas Hogg — We used to play a game called Stuntman, / I explain, when once again I'm called a psychopath / because I don't get scared on fairground rides. / I try to convey that fear / was leaping off the Co-op roof into a skip
How It Began
by Charlotte Muse — The barrel maker gathered up all his wooden soldiers. / One by one he set them where he wanted them. / I am making one of the wonders of the world! he announced. / You will see! And he made a show of planing wood.
Mirage
by Jeremy Wikeley — I’m driving. The devil’s riding shotgun. / Well? He waves out the window. Was it worth it? / Ahead, the A36 piles into Wiltshire / like a needle piercing through a quilt. / The countryside is a knotted rope of cars. / I'm driving.
Crowned
by Maria Taylor — Anna who’ll become my mother / enters the café. The matchmaker waves from her till. / Her nephew is thirty-eight. / Anna is thirty-one. She sees crowns of white blossom / crossing over their heads. A money dance. // Hears a baby
The Day Cattle Broke Through the Fence at the Outbreak of the Ukraine War
by Graham Mort — They were belted Galloways, black with milky / cummerbunds, grazing in the field below gardens / between mole hills and thistles above the beck / that
Erasures
by Maryann Corbett — It was, he first explains, a summer job. / The sort you ordinarily forget — / work-study, during graduate school. His task / was hauling the condemned away for burning / or rending limb from limb. Not people, no, / but books
Boulder Song
by Wendy Pratt — The boulder sings like a tuning fork sings; / vibrating with the glacier’s movement. Listen. // Opposite a bus shelter, beside a bypass, / the boulder sings a Shap granite score / back to the pressure of its creation. // It is a sound
Tellisford Weir
by Ruth Sharman — We’ve swum in this river before, / though no one steps / in the same river twice. // The glassy shock, four or five frantic strokes / before we glide downstream / as if we could go on for ever: // these are familiar; what's new