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
The Friday Poem archive
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
Jamón Ibérico
by Regina Weinert — April in the Sierra Morena is mild. A hint of heat. / Knobbly-kneed holm oaks, widely spaced, // cast shade over drifts of green and yellow. / The pigs must be ecstatic. They grunt and chuckle. // Grass blades stroke their
Airborne
by Mary Mulholland — Tell me about when they dropped you and you flew / to the mud-banks of the Ijssel near Arnhem, / scarcely more than a child, with parachute wings. // By your bedside you still have a book: The Psychology / of Fear: How to
Waiting with Leszek
by June Wentland — This hospital is a strange place, / he tells us. It’s a ship that sails. // He’s not sure if intent is there or not: / a liner responding to schedules // or a nurse driven mad by over work — / releasing wards