Friday Poems
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
Chapwench
by Jay Whittaker — Where do I start? / Not with the gut punch, / all my father said / after I came out. //
I’ve deleted his slander from this page. / I choose not to repeat it. / Didn’t he apologise? / Don’t I have the last word? // It was the argument
Puggy Baby
by Rowan Bell — Dear Daddy, I love you so much / but I don’t want you to come / to my pre-wedding party. You’ll be / there at the lunch, so you mustn’t be glum. // You can go home on the train / and spend a few moments alone / in Tavistock Square
More friendly, more humble than a bird
by Nell Prince — The early light is wooly blue / and comes with a buzz: outside / the room a single bee assumes / a sonic prominence, sounds large // against the dusty silences. / It gives the quiet day
Ping
by Martyn Crucefix — I will talk of course / but mostly I listen / and at lunchtime / snowflakes crashing down // onto London tarmac / though you’d hardly / call this snow / perhaps even sleet // yet something more / fleecy than hailstones / is making
Muscle memory
by Richard Meier — A wide, blank beach in northeast Norfolk, / my young son learning frisbee throws. // A backhand, arrowed from his checkered breast pocket. / A second like it, only one which reaches // the other thrower slower, stalls, / to
The Lego House
by Alexandra Masters — Number 27 have demolished their history. / From the soft gloom of my kitchen I see whistling // men bore the skies with Acrylonitrile, / invade the flight-path of wrens // with neat blocks of happiness. / Click. Now // plastic
Art on the Walls
by Nicholas McGaughey — At some point someone was moved to / put on canvas something that moved / them towards the easel. These reveries / colour and haunt our walls: some bought, / most bequeathed by the discerning dead / who thought
Domestic Economy Reader for Irish Schools
by John Mee — THE FIRST SCHOOL OF CHARACTER / The most delightful task that can be undertaken by a girl / is to make the home happy. A shovel may be heated red hot / and held over the pie dish. Why not use heather
Imagining Sow
by Roger Elkin — Imagine her grin’s wicked innocence — / the sly-eyed tightness of her gaze / glazing over in her blear of peering, /her almost show of not knowing // Imagine her wet ferreting-out snout / nuzzling through earth-dust, her maunching at slops