Friday Poems
Dead Letters (xi)
by Carole Coates — Dear J, // Did we ever talk about papier mache? No? / Not in fifty years? Not in all our conversations? / Maybe not. But I did mention Mr Cuthbert surely, / once Lance-Corporal, teaching forty eight-year-olds / after the one year
frog
by Laura Theis — you are walking down the road / at night // out alone with / only a medium size poodle cross for protection // you’re holding a filched branch of spring / blossoms in one hand // a bag with dog poo in the other / just wondering if
Fox
by Rachel Spence — A fox on a wet autumn night outside the British Museum / fleeing into a gas pipe as I chivvy you out of the building / into the rush-hour rainshine of car metal, headlights, // trampled leaves. I’m several steps ahead when / you
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. // Every year it's out I think of us, / the children, how apples bring / the tree so low, until they thud
The Big Reveal
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