Radio Nights I slide down deep beneath the covers output may be subject to further interruptions on the subject of snow turn dials by torchlight prop the heavy radio knobs for eyes, large square battery for heart on bent knees the nylon sheet crackles with static imagine Luxembourg as a party shape at the far side of the car park the blue vinyl … Continue reading Two poems by Julia Webb
Redefining Progress The land man’s drone hovers over his slavering selection of pigs before their poke. The trough is a circle of pink arses – like a ring of buffet prawns – snuffling at the feed, the filth of mud-stuck trotters in a competition of grunts & steam. My father wedges his pale pink difference between the main hog and its lieutenant. Noshes … Continue reading Two poems by Peter Raynard
Normalisation It’s like the old days; a fortnight’s needs in tins under the stairs. The crisis, like the weather is changeable. Some days the shops are full, the power constant. Some days the streets are calm. The news is still earnest nothings, outrage, sport and gossip. They haven’t yet asked for your passwords. The leaves turn. You still have a job. The wild … Continue reading Three poems by Tom Sastry
An Early Swim She cuts down her lane like scissors through blue silk with barely a snip; her deft turn at each end is a stitch. One morning, she will rise from the ladder, the pool draped over her shoulders like a cape of kingfishers. He rolls like a barrel of vintage port cast overboard, his crawl Shakespearean in its comedy and slaughter … Continue reading Two poems by Mark Fiddes
Three poems from Near Future Summer with Robobees Those long evenings they giddied in the warm wealth of the oilseed rapefields humidity sensors estimating approaching storms * We picnicked on the lawn in July – shuttlecocks pinged distantly our scones and jam unbothered by the robobees their algorithms danced them between marigolds * Sometimes they get indoors through open windows go from … Continue reading Three poems by Suzannah Evans
October 4th 2003 Our future is a free flying kite or a gull or a scarf on the wind. I bend gracefully to thank and smile, thank and smile; a ballerina in a music box. That night I unpin my hair, in a ritual undressing, a re-virgining of my whole self, it seems absolutely right that the roots at my scalp ache, as … Continue reading Three poems by Wendy Pratt
Returning ‘You say I am repeating something I have said before… I shall say it again. This is the spring time but not in time’s covenant.’ – T.S. Eliot, East Coker/Little Gidding One afternoon I woke up words no one uses now: When Flora had ourfret the firth, in May of every moneth queen, when merle and mavis singis with mirth, more … Continue reading Two poems by Kevin Cahill
Without Trying Although without trying we are in step in the sunken lane I walk with the green-veined butterfly and you are alone at my side. My friend flies ahead, explores wild honeysuckle but returns and circles us like … Continue reading Three poems by Ginny Saunders
As You Are 90, I Must Be 65 There’s something wrong with the guttering: it could be nests. When it rains cataracts drown the geraniums. This is one problem. Another is the rockery, overrun by Creeping Jenny and saplings which would become a forest left to their own devices. Someone stole the lilies-of-the-valley, and the heathers, which promised so well, have disappeared. The … Continue reading Two poems by Kathy Pimlott
Three poems from The AQI (smith|doorstop 2018) Smog I don’t have long to write so let me tell you that today’s smog is so thick that I’ve sat inside with a headache, wearing a face-mask next to an air purifier, that the recorded figures are double the hazardous limit, that these measurements are probably a generous estimate, that I’m sitting within my … Continue reading Three poems by David Tait
