Friendly Street Poets

The Poem of the Month for December is The Crow by Tess Driver. The Commended Poem is Fleas by Suzanne Verrall. Congratulations to both of them, and to all the poets who have had poems selected in 2018. 

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.… Click for more

The November Poem of the Month is Sticky Notes by Maria Vouis and the Commended Poem is Ice-shelf by Jules Leigh Koch.

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.                                        

September’s Poem of the Month is The Right Dog by Steve Evans. Commended poems are A Plague of Ologists by Peter J Meech and Big Red, Birdsville by Jacqui Merckenschlager. 

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.… Click for more