Haircuts and House Parties
Newscasters and politicians
looking dapper on the telly.
The neighbours in Flat 54
giving it welly.
Me on my tod
writing shit poetry.
Vaccinated
The poet couldn’t find anything
to rhyme with Astra Zeneca,
so he watched the North London
Derby instead.
Should Gareth Bale Cut His Hair?
I don’t care.
Daniel Ryan has come out of poetic retirement, but when his poetry gets rejected, he’ll probably go back in.
Anaconda
I once had a pet anaconda,
Of which I could not have been fonder,
Though it caused some alarm
And significant harm
By its strong inclination to wander.
Stegosaurus
We take care with our pet stegosaurus,
Lest the spikes at its rear end should gore us,
As with one mighty flail
Of its big spiky tail
It could render us horribly porous.
Mark Totterdell’s poems have appeared widely in magazines and have occasionally won prizes. His collections are This Patter of Traces (Oversteps Books, 2014) and Mapping (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2018).
Sarah lives in the North of England and her poetry has been published in Obsessed with Pipework, The Dawntreader, Presence and Blithe Spirit.
What Can You Do?
You know what it’s like
when you open a can of beans
and empty them into a bowl
and you look in the can
and there’s 4 or 5 beans
that resolutely refuse to move?
So you hit the bottom of the can
to shift those beans but they have
only moved halfway down the can?
So you have to get a spoon
to get them out. and it’s a clean spoon.
F***ing hell, you have to get a CLEAN
spoon to shift those f****ers into the bowl.
More bloody work for me washing cutlery,
which, by the way, I F****ing hate.
Modern life. What can you do?
You know what it’s like
when you start to nod off
when reading a book and you lose
your place in the book because
you dropped it? And you snap awake
and wonder what the F***k, where am I?
And then you try to get back into the book
but you don’t remember the last 20 pages you read?
Modern life. What can you do?
You know what it’s like
when wrapping a parcel
you can’t get the edge
of the sellotape, because
you can’t see it on the tape spool
and you have to feel around the spool
to feel the edge? And then you spend
F***ing ages trying to get your nail
under the edge do you can peel off a strip?
And when you do peel it back you reach
for the scissors and the tape drops back
on to the F***ing spool? And then you finally
get to cut a strip but it folds back on itself?
And when you want to wrap a parcel you peel off
four or five strips and stick them to a table top
and one by one they curl under and stick
so you have to peel them off and they get all twisted
and stick to themselves? Modern life. What can you do?
John Murphy is a retired lecturer and musician. He has been published in many journals and magazines over the years and is the editor of the online magazine The Lake. He published a book in 2009, The Thing Is…
What Can You Do?
You know what it’s like
when you open a can of beans
and empty them into a bowl
and you look in the can
and there’s 4 or 5 beans
that resolutely refuse to move?
So you hit the bottom of the can
to shift those beans but they have
only moved halfway down the can?
So you have to get a spoon
to get them out. and it’s a clean spoon.
F***ing hell, you have to get a CLEAN
spoon to shift those f****ers into the bowl.
More bloody work for me washing cutlery,
which, by the way, I F****ing hate.
Modern life. What can you do?
You know what it’s like
when you start to nod off
when reading a book and you lose
your place in the book because
you dropped it? And you snap awake
and wonder what the F***k, where am I?
And then you try to get back into the book
but you don’t remember the last 20 pages you read?
Modern life. What can you do?
You know what it’s like
when wrapping a parcel
you can’t get the edge
of the sellotape, because
you can’t see it on the tape spool
and you have to feel around the spool
to feel the edge? And then you spend
F***ing ages trying to get your nail
under the edge do you can peel off a strip?
And when you do peel it back you reach
for the scissors and the tape drops back
on to the F***ing spool? And then you finally
get to cut a strip but it folds back on itself?
And when you want to wrap a parcel you peel off
four or five strips and stick them to a table top
and one by one they curl under and stick
so you have to peel them off and they get all twisted
and stick to themselves? Modern life. What can you do?
John Murphy is a retired lecturer and musician. He has been published in many journals and magazines over the years and is the editor of the online magazine The Lake. He published a book in 2009, The Thing Is…
What Can You Do?
You know what it’s like
when you open a can of beans
and empty them into a bowl
and you look in the can
and there’s 4 or 5 beans
that resolutely refuse to move?
So you hit the bottom of the can
to shift those beans but they have
only moved halfway down the can?
So you have to get a spoon
to get them out. and it’s a clean spoon.
F***ing hell, you have to get a CLEAN
spoon to shift those f****ers into the bowl.
More bloody work for me washing cutlery,
which, by the way, I F****ing hate.
Modern life. What can you do?
You know what it’s like
when you start to nod off
when reading a book and you lose
your place in the book because
you dropped it? And you snap awake
and wonder what the F***k, where am I?
And then you try to get back into the book
but you don’t remember the last 20 pages you read?
Modern life. What can you do?
You know what it’s like
when wrapping a parcel
you can’t get the edge
of the sellotape, because
you can’t see it on the tape spool
and you have to feel around the spool
to feel the edge? And then you spend
F***ing ages trying to get your nail
under the edge do you can peel off a strip?
And when you do peel it back you reach
for the scissors and the tape drops back
on to the F***ing spool? And then you finally
get to cut a strip but it folds back on itself?
And when you want to wrap a parcel you peel off
four or five strips and stick them to a table top
and one by one they curl under and stick
so you have to peel them off and they get all twisted
and stick to themselves? Modern life. What can you do?
John Murphy is a retired lecturer and musician. He has been published in many journals and magazines over the years and is the editor of the online magazine The Lake. He published a book in 2009, The Thing Is…
BORING
10 minutes into wandering
through an M&S petrol station
I realised I’d forgotten my headphones
and the podcast I thought was boring
was in fact two middle aged men behind me
chatting about A roads.
Carl Burkitt likes to tell tales. He tells long tales, short tales, silly tales, sad tales and likes to tell them online, behind a mic, in books, in schools or on the sofa with his young family in London. Read more at www.carltellstales.com
How to read at an open mic
When it’s your turn to read
make quite sure you’re still muted.
People like to watch you mouthing.
Spend most of your time
shuffling through your papers, saying,
‘I’m sure I’ve got it somewhere.’
Give a long, rambling introduction
about how your father used to go fishing
only this poem isn’t about that.
Keep your head down over your copy
or hunch up, squinting at your phone.
At all costs avoid facing the camera.
Ideally, print your poems
on the back of private documents
and hold them up in front of your face –
bills and bank statements are ideal.
That way you’ll keep the audience’s interest
and get lots of comments in the chat.
Read in a poetry voice that goes up
wherever you’d expect it to go down.
Draw out the last syllable of each line.
If you read a second poem,
say, ‘I’ve only just written this
and haven’t managed to revise it yet.’
Before you finish, do apologise –
if you haven’t done so already –
for not having written your poems better.
Sit staring vacantly afterwards
so people don’t know if you’re done
then forget to mute your coughs and slurps of tea.
4 By Bloody 4’s
Huge SUV, 4 by bloody 4,
Parked right outside my front door.
In narrow Edwardian city streets,
Those 4 X 4’s like to retreat.
I can admire the metallic paint,
That the late evening sun warmly glints.
But there is no light streaming through,
My tall beckoning windows as it ought to do!
The pollution that these vehicles exhale,
Dust’s lungs and glass in dirty veils.
My city is not 4 X 4’s natural habitat,
Country lanes and tracks is where that’s at.
But what about the snow!
4 by four drivers want to know.
Well in our cities, those 2 days a year,
Mean you should stay at home and drink beer.
Lisa Lopresti (she/her)is a poet from the statue toppling City of Bristol. She has been broadcast on BBC Radio Bristol and published in magazines and anthologies. Lisa performs in spoken word events and has found this both terrifying and exhilarating. She likes to convey poems to portray, this life.
https://lisa-lopresti-poetry.webnode.com/
Cocks
Things were never easy
nor were they hard
The conflict was an unending one
with seven blind men groping the elephant
rightly at all wrong places.
For the onlookers it was a comic show
For the blind men a harsh reality.
The hens kept clucking
Perhaps giggling at the eternal dilemma
Humans faced while deducing
the evolutionary equations
about who came first,
the clucking hens
or their encapsulated embryos.
The poor cocks were left unattended
Till they ran unbridled
like their human homonyms.
They too sometimes became easy
and sometimes hard.
Mohammad Zahid is a poet and translator from Kashmir, India. His maiden poetry collection The Pheromone Trailbagged the Best Book Award from the Academy of Art Culture and Languages, Jammu &Kashmir in 2015.
His poetry has appeared in many Indian and international journals. He is a translation editor for Kashmiri Language at Muse India and Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts.
