Friday Poems
Pathé News Visits the Ace of Spades
by Matthew Paul — The crew don’t capture Noël and Ivor snorting cocaine / off the black-marble bar; the gargoyles they actually film / are me and my pals: Marcel waves
What the Doorman Says
by Ben Wilkinson — That he could kill for a smoke. / That the punters get older every year. / That really, he hardly ever has to lay a finger. / That even arterial blood washes right out. / That the fella with the dog
Found by a man who was walking his dog
by Robert Etty — It wasn’t the only thing he’s found: bones / (not surprisingly), fully fleshed bodies / and single limbs, bombs, mines, meteorites, / sausages with new
Coda
by Rory Waterman — In our perfected future, there will be / a bedroom in the loft, a baby boy / to fill it, and we’ll kiss on sun-kissed sand / in every paradise we dreamed about // before you changed, when I first took you
Frozen
by Jonathan Totman — She wants to know what makes the villain / lift his sword. I tell her sometimes people do / bad things when they’re sad or angry or scared /and we wonder about the brothers who pretended
The Solvent Properties of Water
by Sarah Hymas — We'd been talking about our childhoods, / how foreign they were to the world we navigated now, / yet how, somehow, we were still those girls / who peered under rocks and poked at the cracks
Saturday Morning
by Martin Figura — That paving slab the working week / squared away and set to rest, leave them / to their tea, their Chronicle, the felt pen reek / of circled ads, let unencumbered men // go, go, hungover in their dinted vans
Portrait of my mother as a hop-picker
by Liz Cashdan — She would never have done hop-picking / so this portrait is going to be difficult. / She hated the open air, the sunshine, // meeting up with ordinary folk
Reading Banville
by Tim Relf — Cicatrice gets me googling, / as does horrent, minatory and coevals. Ditto deckle, flocculent and satyr. How / can I have got to 50 and not know so many words? How / can I have gone through this
The Last Time
by Ann Grey — The iPhone photo says University of Cambridge, Trinity Hall / 19th October 2018, which tells you nothing of the last day / we took our mother over Garrett Hostel Bridge, stopped to / watch the ducks
Down Time
by Chris Jones — You used to joke you were a champion sleeper / a heavyweight, the kind who’d knuckle down / to eight hour shifts without so much as a peep; / reel wide-screen dreams before you drifted round
The February Museum: recent acquisitions
by Jane Routh — Fraxinus excelsior 18” square-cut deadwood log / with egg galleries of Hylesinus varius // Retrieved from the log pile, a long block / inscribed with life cycles: