Friday Poems
The Control Room
by Suzannah Evans — every morning we are overjoyed / to find her plutonium heart still halving // it feels like she’s seen so much but then / haven’t we seen it all too // from our padded office chairs / the glinting
The colour blue
by Carla Scarano D'Antonio — 1. The stark blue sky, solid in summer at the camping site in Ostia countryside. It was always blue, day / after day with sporadic transparent white clouds. We took it for granted like the rising
My Country
by Alan Buckley — A man is judged by his work — Kurdish proverb // His fingers work the lotion into my skin. / His palms come to rest, pressing my cheeks, / before he draws them back. I close my eyes // but can't not see
The Astronaut Who Came To Tea
by Sarah Wimbush — Theirs was a strange spacesuit. / Some wore garb the colour / of saffron, pimpernels, dirt-tracks, / girded themselves with sovereign / coinage and jaunty brims
Out of the blue
by Richie McCaffery — She left me at the height of nesting season, / birds building as I was dismantling my home. // She left me as saplings we’d planted were fruiting, / their berries tart as the metal of front door keys
the kitchen
by Amanda Joshua — The first thing I learn about you in the kitchen is that it’s impossible for us to cook together without contemplating double homicide / On the second day of lockdown you go out for “essentials”
Phantom Settlements
by Mat Riches — She would no doubt accuse me of esquivalience / if I didn’t tell you about the world famous / fountain designer, Lillian Mountweazel. Despite / her death in an explosion while taking pictures
Inheritance
by Sharon Phillips —My first break from college, on a shift / down the sorting office, I’m lobbing / letters into slots, faster and faster, / having a laugh at it, makes a change / from fretting I’m daft all term
My Farm
by Rob Mackenzie — Because a true poet possesses transferable skills / and ten thousand hours of staring at blank screens / to note the detail others pass over, I have decided, / this time next year, to become
Mottephobia
by Heidi Beck — Perhaps it was a Peppered Moth, / the kind they taught us / proved Darwin’s theory, / changing camouflage to survive. // Or maybe a Pink Underwing, / dull on top with that fleshy startle
A Harp So Strung with Rain
by Michael Grieve — It was a long forgotten folk saying / I thought, though one that neither she nor I / had any means of bringing to the open. / Neither our luck nor expertise nor will / would serve us well
I think you get it, John
by Jill Munro — You seem to understand, John, what a poem means, / how it promises whatever has been cannot disappear // as if it had never been. A friend asked me to write / a Kenopsia, strange name