Each month the current Anthology Editors select a Poem of the Month, chosen from those submitted at the FSP Open Mic events.
Here are the Poems of the Month for 2018, selected by Veronica Cookson and Lindy Warrell.
FEBRUARY: The Man Who Walked by F J Willett
MARCH: Whassup Mozart? by Gordon McPherson
APRIL: Triple Trounced by Louise Nicholas
MAY: Mirror Image by Roger Higgins
JUNE: This Business of Learning by Erica Jolly
JULY: Toy Boys by Elaine Barker
AUGUST: lived unremarkably by Geoffrey Aitken
SEPTEMBER: The Right Dog by Steve Evans
NOVEMBER: Sticky Notes by Maria Vouis
DECEMBER: The Crow by Tess Driver
The Man Who Walked by F J Willett
His days were bleak and grim and gray.
His mood was dark and fell and fey.
Her hair was black. Her raven hair
That framed her face and haughty stare.
He walked alone without a hope.
He never saw her, never spoke.
He walked across the village square.
He passed the woman standing there.
She had no smile for him that day,
No smile to light his shadowed way.
His wife had died. Had passed away.
Now all his days were grim and gray
His days were bleak and grim and gray.
His mood was dark and fell and fey.
And every day he passed her there,
The woman standing in the square.
Her haughty look her icy stare
Reproached him as he passed her there.
Then one day, like a sign from God
She smiled. He turned and gave a nod.
While grief still stung within his breast
It seemed to sting a little less.
It sometimes seems that it can be
The little things that set you free.
Whassup Mozart? by Gordon McPherson
How I wonder
you holy grailers,
galactic sailors,
and serenaders
of space time,
blinking and hoodwinking,
through the cosmos,
the universal BIOS,
How I wonder
you disco glitzes
when you power up
your Ritzes
and your ditzy minuets
and jet those rays
around and down
and blitz
the frowning ground,
starfound,
with your rainbow outfits,
How I wonder
you tinsels,
when you sprinkle
your ticker tape parade
on the stellar freeways,
those ballets
and screenplays
of technicolour highs
and ballroomeyes,
when your cries
sing like millions
of magic flute sighs
in the quicksilver hordes
aboard the night sky,
How I wonder
you Cosi Fan sparklers,
in the rococo thunder
of your torn asunder
starbrights,
kinking the gravity fields
and sinking your far heights
in the light’s plunder,
How I wonder
you Big Bang strays,
you supernova front pages,
you red shift tearaways,
and how I ponder
you Mozart DJ’s,
what you wanderers
what you twinklers
really,
really are.
Triple Trounced by Louise Nicholas
She left school at fourteen but when our mother’s mind
wasn’t Webster’s Dictionary, or Miss Manner’s Book
of Common Courtesy, it was a Letraset jumble of letters
that spent part of each day falling in and out with each other:
- three-letter words beginning with ‘a’,
seven-letter words that housed a ‘z’,
four-letter words with no need for an ‘e’.
On rainy days, the Scrabble board emerged
and we’d no sooner placed the three-letter
Nip-and-Fluff word we’d spent ten minutes excavating
from a dictionary already bloodied with our desperation,
- than she would trounce it
with a ‘j’ on a triple-letter
or a ‘z’ on the double word.
When she reached the finishing line,
she’d look back at us – trailing our degrees
and advanced diplomas where she had none –
see that we were held to ransom
- by four ‘a’s
or a ‘v’
or a ‘u’-less q
and not even try to stifle a smile.
Mirror Image by Roger Higgins
The mirror stretches the full length of the wall
above twin sinks and a ledge cluttered
with skin creams and cosmetics.
You cannot help but see yourself
in excruciating detail from top to bottom,
by which I really mean buttocks.
Hair is thick but more grey than the brown it was
and too long for your age and demographic,
chest hair also grey and not a suitable camouflage
for dark brown barnacles and sunspots,
your heritage from a younger life
of beaches and back-yard games.
Your left shoulder sits a little higher than the right,
askew by a series of strains and sprains,
and you have an older man’s tendency towards breast fat.
A waistline is prominent and masculine if viewed straight on
but imperceptible from the side due to a stomach bulge
resistant to even a moderated consumption of a good life.
There is a shock of curly grey pubes just above the bench top,
then you lose the vision of your best features,
firm thighs and calves maintained by regular walking
which an app tells you averages six kilometres
and twelve thousand steps daily, including eight flights
of stairs, exercise that is more accidental than planned.
You could be a portraitist’s prototype for the phase
between middle-aged and old. Your cataract-encrusted eyes
don’t blur vanity, it seems, or memory,
and you can still see a pretty boy
This Business of Learning by Erica Jolly
It seems as if I have to wait till now
trying to find out how the process works.
One thing I think I know at last
is this. Probably it began unspoken
the day my father did not come home.
Was that the moment I lost it –
joy in laughter, delight, trust in love
since comfort in my childhood was gone?
Was that the day my childhood died?
Was that when I began to hate my name?
How could I be jolly? Up on that balcony
above his chemist shop how could I laugh?
He would not be there with his camera,
his Brownie, taking those photos of me
smiling up at him, feeling secure, loved.
What was I being told by that absence,
the loss of his lap, his voice, calling me Eck –
a voice I’ve had no way of hearing –
the loss of the tobacco-laden smell of him
upstairs with me after work or golf?
Will the answer come as I look back?
I hope it does. I feel the learning comes
through moments – maybe devastating,
maybe unexpected – affecting decisions,
not through school time seated at desks.
Eighty-one years on, that moment,
expecting to see him come through the door,
anticipating he would hug me first, call me Eck.
He had been away for so long it seemed.
Why was only mother coming in?
Toy Boys by Elaine Barker
The gnomes I chose are stop-at-homes.
This spot in my garden is the place
they gaudily claim. Though gnomes
do roam — you hear of them
disappearing months at a time.
They send cards from wherever
they’ve been, only to reappear
one morning tight-lipped, benign.
Yet no such trivial travel
would ever interest my gnomes.
Like a squat of fancy birds
they parade, preen, step out
untrammelled from the ferns.
Accepting a terracotta life
they raise red-hatted heads,
might grumble at unseasonal rains.
lived unremarkably by Geoffrey Aitken
imagined precisely
authored biologically
managed medically
carried expectantly
raised exactly
schooled religiously
worshipped naively
dreamed unimaginatively
trained mechanically
loved inattentively
married prematurely
housed uniformly
reproduced expeditiously
urbanized routinely
worked tirelessly
aspired inappropriately
retired remorsefully
travelled reluctantly
aged tragically
died hypothetically
recycled metaphysically
in so many ways
The Right Dog by Steve Evans
There’s craft in this, a gift,
An art to choosing
The right dog
In the pound.
My daughter can’t decide.
It’s finally the promised day but
It’s too much for her.
There’s music in them all,
Keen as they dance from paw to paw—
Except one dog that calmly raises its nose.
Who are you, my daughter asks?
That slow gaze returning says:
I am half of our future days.
The dog has made its choice.
Sticky Notes by Maria Vouis
Signs everywhere,
of your studies,
like a litter trail
of sticky notes
bookmarking your passage.
Thumbprint punctuation
on wrists’ transparent skin,
ink-stains between clavicles,
fluoro highlights doodled on breast-cleft roads,
sweat runnels blurring
intertextual references,
a slurry of metaphors
scribbled into my navel,
cyanotypes where your lips loitered,
a palmist’s prophesy printed on a bare buttock,
thighs propped open like chapters
at the plot’s peak,
your back-catalogue of luminous lines
indexed and bound between my hip bones,
your name graffitied,
with possessive apostrophe behind my knees,
and a tiny tick-tack pulse
on my throat
typed by your tongue.
The Crow by Tess Driver
Flames lash the sizzling bones of molten walls:
Crackling heat, a keening call of birds
As wild-eyed stallions crush against their stalls.
Her Monday wash hangs smouldering, then falls,
The cats run howling, roasting in their fur,
Flames lash the sizzling bones of molten walls.
The wind is singing fiercely as it mauls
And guzzling flames spew out their greedy words.
The wild-eyed stallions crush against their walls.
A mother, dragging one child, blindly calls;
A bird’s dark flight is caught in the smoky blur-
Flames lash the sizzling bones of molten walls
And all is deafened by the fiery roars.
The smoke imprisons and inters
The wild-eyed stallions crushed against their stalls.
The girl relives her blackened past, recalls
The crow’s harsh cry. Her mother’s fear recurs.
Flames lash the sizzling bones of molten walls
As wild-eyed stallions crush against their stalls.