Friday Poems
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:
The Unicyclist of Benghazi
by Christopher James — Like a cricket balanced on a 1 piastre piece, / my father spun through city streets. / Make a friend of the horizon, he’d tell me. / Remember, we already know how to / ride the single wheel
Guitar
by Tess Jolly — After the collision of her car with his wheel, / of his small body with the road // and of my world with hers, a stranger / so distraught I found myself comforting her; // after the gathering
Portrait of the Poet as an Artist
by Chris Edgoose — The Pity was waiting for Michelangelo / in a perfect block of Carrara marble, / and in its carving he learned the weight, / the hang, and the fold of his own heart, / whose hidden dimensions
The End of the Pier Show
by Helen Ivory — Roll up roll up ladies and gentlemen / for this once in a lifetime, once in a deathtime experience / coming to your town for one night only / this five-ring circus of mythic proportions! // Take off
Leonard Cohen’s unknown teacher speaks from his strings
by Amlanjyoti Goswami — I taught him ways to hold time / By his fingertips. // String moments in palm / Repeat pattern. // Park bench, oak and mahogany, / Girls playing tennis
Our Children’s Childhoods
by Charlotte Gann — It was a hard, cold, wet slog, that climb. / We were heading away from shelter // talking as we walked, skirting around / our scariest subjects: when we didn’t love / enough, when we loved
Lone Wolf
by Anthony Wilson — The rain is a lost child / wondering the zoo // at midnight / with only wolves for company. // At dawn they slink / back inside – // the light has nothing to teach them. / The rain is not bothered
Part of me can’t hear the moon calling anymore
by Emma Simon — Isn’t it always the same, within a crisis / another smaller crisis following its own orbit. / For years now I’ve been singing to her tunes / listening to the pluck
Flying the Lanner
by Tony Curtis — A ball of clawed and beaked fluff in the cage: // first she must walk / and then run / and then learn to fly / but only to Griff, who is her mother / and the only mother she will ever know.
The Baby in the Wardrobe
by Kathy Pimlott — Do you remember the story of the baby in the wardrobe, / its desiccated body wrapped in newspaper? How the baby / was decades old but the newspaper was last week’s edition?
Hotel Anonymous
by Mike Barlow — Someone in the room next door / is practising the oboe, those clear / woody notes going over and over / the same bars, never finding perfection, / never satisfied but reminding me / of one particular