Poem of the day

A Hot Drop

by Erica Van Horn

27 November

Pink

by Mary Lee

26 November

Bob's Car

by Russell Thompson

The man stands by his pick-up

truck and whirrs the automatic

windlass into life. Bob, Bob’s 

wife and Bob’s wife’s niece watch.

 

When he arrived, he eyed Bob’s car,

scratched his baseball-cap, said the ad

had had him understand it wasn’t quite

so… But he’d take it. For parts.

 

Bob has been busy: he’s jettisoned

the other contents of the corrugated iron

garage. Only two prehistoric oil-cans –

‘good for ten years yet’ – get saved.

 

The cable tautens, and Bob’s car –

insofar as it can still be called 

a car – ploughs into daylight. No tyres.

No engine. Chassis on the gravel.

 

The man operates the controls

with one thumb. ‘Can we help at all?’

‘No, it’s OK.’ Bob’s wife’s niece’s small

son’s playing with a bucketful of stones.

 

The pick-up humps up the unmade lane.

Bob’s car rides piggyback, bumping side

to side. They turn onto the main road

at the top, and everybody goes inside.
 

25 November

The Women in My Family

by Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

23 November

Lingering

by Richard Goring

22 November

Winter

by Ruby Robinson

We keep the tortoise in the fridge through the winter.

We buy our shopping from the corner shop on the way

home from work, as and when we need it. We dry our

washing on radiators. We pick chillies from the medusa chilli

plant on the kitchen windowsill. We listen to the same CD

over and over for days, weeks at a time. We eat chilli most

nights. We take it in turns to wash up. We talk a fair bit

with the curtains closed. We talk about your ex lovers.

We talk about chelonian hibernation and substrates.

We sometimes talk about sphagnum moss. We check the

tortoise, although we don’t really know what it is we are

checking. You put an extra blanket on our bed. We sleep.