Guest Poems
We love to read your poetry and, even though we receive over 1,000 poems per month, we always take time to read every single one.
A few of the poems we especially enjoyed and which were selected for publication in our Journal are reprinted below.
For more information, please see our Submissions page.
Guest Poems
Annie Kissack
Saint with Accoutrements
after ‘Mrs Mounter at the Breakfast Table’ by Harold Gilman
All spotless. Some objects we might deem
especially significant:
the glistening tea pot, pristine cups
lustrous milk bowl, the best surely.
We inhale diverse aromas:
odour of home-made polish, Jeyes Fluid, Vim.
Mrs Mounter, tell us why?
Perhaps she’s a saint, a kitchen anchorite
sealed into contemplation of a state of grace
so very nearly reached.
A martyr to the Sunlight Soap,
the damask drape, her table is in order;
observe her coronet of curious light,
that hint of halo.
At three o clock she sits and waits.
Behind the periwinkle eyes,
a mind is ranging wide through space;
her best is not enough.
Each day she relocates the empty cup
a fraction to the left and trusts
the virtuous will one day be rewarded.
Jonathan Steffen
Car Coat
Through all the subtle chicanes of his existence in the 1960s,
It was his constant companion –
That car coat redolent of hairpin bends and handbrake turns,
Bearing him along shopping parades and in and out of supermarkets,
Evoking pine-clad mountains and Alpine meadows
And the sophisticated heartaches
Of Bacharach & David songs,
Its pockets primed with cigarettes and menthol sweets,
Its collar turned up for raffish effect,
Quilted and poppered and cut short for ease of movement,
Economically negotiating a world of prawn cocktails and vol-au-vents,
Of frozen peas and Black Forest gateaux,
Always on the lookout for that checkout girl
Who would instantly recognise him and,
Slipping on a silk headscarf without a word,
Abandon her supermarket till forever
To accompany him on revving, rolling rides
Down roads the shape of trumpet solos
In the roaring rally car
That he would never own.
More Guest Poems
Lori Drummond-Mundal
Rooks Over Mariupol Rooks raise a complaint, but cannot erase the blinding mist. I live in the mist of a distant land. The sun is veiled yet I know it exists. Raucous rooks tear from branch tips, black into squall. Tempest of wings rip at seams, imagined and real....
Huw Gwynn-Jones
Say her Name Not the physical boy but the masculine shadow, cruciform over the family. Geraldine Clarkson Sometimes I see his ageing face, that stare, pained and cold as a codfish. Is this how it was, Uncle, the incessant hunger, your mother’s belly, trial by fire?...
Kathy Miles
Fallout rain fell differently that year air hung on its chains clothed in a plume of ions it lay beneath the ground bitter as history or a buried tongue some said the sheep were glowing in the dark ghosting fields with blue light their hooves dusted with stars lambs...
Sydney Lea
Violence 4 August, 2020 We once longed to have bald eagles back. And back they came, from poisons that doomed so many over the years. At last, they’re common again. This morning, I saw two wrangle over a hatchling loon in the crown of a pine. Their little war shivered...
John Muro
Sea Drift Something of this place stays with me still and the hand-cloth of memory will not allow me to wipe it away. It’s pinned beneath a world that’s beyond forgetting and smelling always of salted brume and rusted metal and the nearly sweet scent of diesel fuel...
Greta Stoddart
A Glass of Water So many ways of looking at a glass of water – why is one clearly not enough? Because there are many ways to look and it’s a different kind of sustenance we’re after when we look at a glass of water and maybe there’s no such thing as failure when we...
Rosie Jackson
Grief: A User’s Guide Follow the instructions carefully. Do not use your grief for purposes other than the one for which it is intended. Extreme caution must be taken. Lift your grief, do not drag. If you find any resistance, cut into pieces. Gently shake if...
Doreen Hinchliffe
Memento Mori at an exhibition of Victorian photographs of the dead Posed and dressed in Sunday best, their heads clamped tight in a metal vice, their bodies propped on stands or chairs, they stare at us across the years and fix us with their unreal eyes, inviting us...
Geoffrey Winch
In this Silence To her the silence had been in itself a prayer, the deepest, the holiest, the most illuminating. T. F. Powys: Mister Tasker’s Gods its utter depth and width can only leave one standing on this canyon’s rim entirely without speech its walls stacked so...