Friday Poems

Apple blossom

by Jackie Wills — The year Dylan's mother died / I picked sprays of apple blossom, / wound its pink, off-white shades / in raffia for you to take to him.

by Julie-Ann Rowell — Nantes, teeming rain like an angry child’s tears / and everything closed because it’s Monday. / We topple into a bar tabac. Men cluster / around tin-top tables, a fat Jack Russell / wandering despondently

Evening on the Porch

by Jodie Hollander — The rocking chair is rocking, / though no one sits in it / on this windless evening, / and yet this rocking, rocking, / back and forth as if / a soul could somehow wish / to be here once again / on long warm evenings

The Dowry of Hera

by Rebecca Ferrier — I am training myself in happiness through lemons: / think well, dart citrus to tongue, take joy’s embalmment as sweet lemonade. / Between an avenue of knuckle is a pip I squeeze from joint / and plant to yellow the outside.

Funeral

by Tony Kitt — People from different parts / of one’s life / don’t know each other. // They walk behind the coffin / in silence, / each mourning / a different person.

The Biddy Boys

by Frank Dullaghan — Three times I called from outside. / Being the eldest girl, I was tasked to do so. / I bid them kneel and then entered / with an armful of rushes from the marsh, / which I heaped by the wall. / We prayed to St. Brigid, had a big pot

Evolution

by Colm Scully — These days I remember things that never happened; / how the world was won / by us, through our evolution, / winning each fitness battle that we fought. // How we changed just the right amount / at just the right time

The Instrument

by Andrew Neilson — I dreamt the body was an instrument / and lay as such, beneath a great black lid. / As I waited, subdued in that antique air, / dust gathered on the inward machinery – / the wrest pins and hammers, the tension of strings

The Break

by Tim Goldstone — You see them from the village / only as tiny silhouetted off grid figures / high on the exposed ridge / bending straightening bending / all day long / patching holes / in crumbling dry stone walls, / hot coffee-splutters

Softwood

by Philip Hancock — Two lengths of inch and a half / by a quarter, stacked one on top of the other, / planed: no splinters, no need to tape or tie them. / In one hand seems the natural way / to carry them – no bother. // Impossible to say how they come

Escape

by Rachel Burns — Suddenly, I’ve time warped like in that German TV show / where everyone listens to cool eighty tunes on a Walkman. // I’m fifteen again, sat on the top of the double decker / with best friend, Kat. Look, we are sharing a long menthol

Sisters,

by Karen Smith — there are ways to protect yourselves / from the perils of quickening in these / days of proscription. After the event, hold // your breath, sit with your knees bent / and sneeze out the seed, or prior / plug yourself with nettle leaves