Lost and Found
Creaky knees
Running up stairs
Careless indulgence
Saturated fat avoidance
Levis jeans
M&S elasticated waistlines
Red wine
Alcohol free beer
Dancing till dawn and a burger van chaser
It’s a late night at 11pm
The lemon hue of spring light
The sweet joy of snowdrops
Friends
Family
Birdsong
True love
Gratitude
Lel Meleyal, Scarborough
Queer
(after Guadagnino, Burroughs and Bishop)
Goodness but that yellow paintwork is grubby,
exquisite arches but each one absolutely filthy.
I’d go all the way to Mexico too for that exact blend of canary and grime.
Stupid I know but I’m hungry for new windows, new views.
At your feet, a black rainbow snake nurses its tail.
Alone, unwitnessed means all the time in the world.
How else to account for my days of dust, my rainy city weeks?
Kicking my heels in other people’s tropics,
Is this what they call yearning?
Everyone here’s forever taking a drag,
swallowing, laughing remarkably.
I would do too, in situ.
Careful with that concealed revolver!
I want to talk to you without speaking.
A saucy Miss sits at the bar, eyebrow cocked like a pistol.
Nothing degrades a person like a game of chance,
that white suit is getting grubbier by the hour, it’s the waiting.
Fingers grope in a bowl of sliced lemon, dash salt like dirt on the countertop.
Your hand, a rock, throttles a tumbler. above it, you rumble: más, más.
I want to talk to you without speaking.
I’m not queer, Lee.
I know.
The skyline at dawn like the morning after stubble burn,
the smoke of my sighs by your sleeping ear, más, más.
We all love somebody sometimes.
Dodo Brooks, Kent
A lifetime
We like birds now. We
Can name them. From their song. We
Used to snort Charlie.
Caf, Scarborough
Undo
We don’t know in advance about the things we can’t undo.
I think it is a keyboard button I can press to release myself just in time from a bad decision I didn’t think through in time.
Then there are the deletes you can’t backtrack on no matter how many folders you search through with a sense of futility and despair, which does not come all at once but over days sometimes.
A stab right in the solar plexus with a breath which can’t be drawn quite deeply enough for the relief of tomorrow being another day.
There are images which can be never unseen but as slight comfort to aging process and ravages of a progressive disease my memory is not what it once was. Unreliable and yet dropping in cruelly, one of those fragments I really need an undo or delete option for.
Janet Jones, Sussex
What I learned from this heartbreak
This heartbreak
This raw, turbulent heartbreak
This painful, seemingly endless heartbreak.
It taught me so much.
I have learned to lean into friendships,
To seek joy where there is none,
I have learned to sing,
even though I’m not winning.
What I know now
From this particular heartbreak
Is everything I never knew I needed
Jess Read, Kent
Lost and found
Spending over the last 40 years+ trying to fit into various relationships at work and in my personal life I think I have finally found a ‘better’ me.
Not necessarily ‘better’ to others maybe, but someone who has found out that she needs to choose herself and her needs first.
I was lost and like the ‘poor relative’, surrounded by narcissistic (even toxic) people.
In more recent times, I have opted to withdraw.
I was lost;
lost in a desire to please and rescue;
a true co-dependant;
saying yes to all and sundry, and always doing what I could to ‘impress’.
I have now found a better me.
I know I am worth all the effort I pour into myself.
I know I still care, still want to please, but only if it suits.
Who cares what people truly think of me?
If I love you then I love you with my whole heart but that heart is now ruled a bit better by my head.
Anne Lamb, Kent
Lost and Found
One day I lost my inside smile.
I still knew how to do the outside bit.
How to move my lips
into a curve
but I couldn’t make it reach my eyes.
On another day
after no longer than forever
I felt it creeping about
looking here and there to find the way
and when it reached my eyes
I had found it again.
Megan Williams, Wales
Lost and Found
The loves I lost,
To days darkened by shadows.
The smell of oil paint,
The texture on canvas.
The loves I lost,
To days marked by sorrow,
The quiet word,
A touch of prose.
The loves I gained,
Through healing and strength.
A painting almost complete,
Some prose near finished.
The loves I gained,
Through slow meditation.
Practising an art,
Forming a poem.
To the loves I have always had,
May you remain warm and soft,
May you be in my heart,
And at home at my hearth.
Lauren Marie, Christchurch, Aotearoa
FebulousFebruary 2025: Lost and Found 