‘Las Cigüeñas’ by Matthew Stewart was our Friday Poem on 11/06/2021 — we chose it because it handles its subject matter so deftly and beautifully, from the opening image of the storks’ nest balanced precariously on the stadium pylons to the slightly ominous urgency of the last line. Stewart tells the story aslant, building a mood of unease throughout the poem and preparing us for trouble, so by the time we arrive at the rapid dash home in the last line we are in no doubt that what has been lost is more than just a football match.
Las Cigüeñas
The storks’ nest teeters on floodlight pylons,
bushy hair over thirty-two white eyes
that shine against the darkening skyline.
Just seconds left, the home team’s pressing hard
for a winner. He sits in Fondo Sur,
where he’s always had his season ticket,
and would normally scream at the lino,
the ref or their clumsy centre-forward,
but today the match goes on without him.
Two storks launch, swooping down across the pitch
to hopeful cheers. At the final whistle,
his eyes track their landing back in the nest.
Neither babies nor goals, that’s what they bring.
All of a sudden, he only knows
he’s got to get home to his wife.
Matthew Stewart works in the Spanish wine trade and lives between Extremadura and West Sussex. Following two pamphlets with HappenStancePress, his first full collection, The Knives of Villalejo, was published in 2017. His second, Whatever You Do, Just Don’t (HappenStance, 2023), is reviewed on TFP here. Recent poems have featured in The Spectator, The New European and Wild Court.
Matthew also writes and reviews for TFP. Read Beyond the Bubble, his piece on how poetry can reach out to a wider readership, or his essay on the work of Michael Laskey. He has also reviewed Still by Alan Buckley (Blue Diode, 2025), Everything is Present by Anna Woodford (Salt, 2025), The Conjurer by Pedro Serrano translated by Anna Crowe (Arc Publications, 2024), The Kentish Rebellion by Robert Selby (Shoestring, 2022), Same Difference by Ben Wilkinson (Seren, 2022), and The Storm in the Piano by Christopher James (Maytree Press, 2022).
We chose ‘Presence’ by Marcia Menter as the Friday Poem on 10/04/2022 because we are suckers for a tidy sonnet, and this one is particularly tidy. We love the half-rhymes, the sonic echo, the compression, and the restraint. It’s deft and controlled while at the same time being tender and deeply compassionate, tightly packed with feeling. We like this poem very much indeed. Marcia Menter says: “It is the literal truth of my experience with Susan’s illness. I wrote it down as a sonnet, and there it was. Her death at the end of October, at age 59, haunts me still. This is her poem as much as it is mine.”
Presence
I.M. Susan De Sola
I had to mute my phone and cover the screen
to keep your texts from waking me at night.
Something evil, something you’d almost seen
had breached your dining room and lay in wait —
a waking dream, you said. But it was real,
a malignant presence. And it wanted you.
You wouldn’t go downstairs to get your pills
but sent your husband for them. He said no.
Said it was nonsense. Said it was in your head.
Said you knew better — and of course you did.
The tests were negative. The scans were clear.
Metastasis was possible, but rare.
You almost knew it was in your clever brain.
The minute you turned to face it, you were gone.
Marcia Menter‘s poems have appeared in The Dark Horse, The Rialto, and The Hudson Review, among other places. Her critical essays have appeared in The Dark Horse. Her poetry pamphlet, The Longing Machine, was published by HappenStance Press in 2007.
‘The Laugh’ by Christopher Arksey was our Friday Poem on 04/11/2022 — we reckon it does a pretty perfect job of being a poem. It has a neat pattern of half rhyme, landing on near full rhyme at the end. The line endings feel entirely natural and also add to the sense – look at the enjambment, how the third line tips you into the fourth, and how the fourth line stretches along with the delayed reveal. Each of the first two stanzas is a single sentence, and if you’re into syllables, get counting. The whole is a neat, tight little machine – controlled and expressive. Ten lines, in which Arksey proves he can do it.
The Laugh
It was like you’d surfaced after a spell
underwater; spent and roused at the same time,
breathless toward the inevitable
big-reveal of your long-delayed punchline.
Then you let fly — the laugh of someone twice
your size — with such potency it rocked your frame
and sent you seeking my arm for balance,
stopping short of doubling over from the strain.
Only this soundless record of it exists.
And I forget the joke, but I’ve got the gist.
Christopher Arksey is a writer and voice actor living in Hull. His poems are published in the Broken Sleep Books anthology Companions of His Thoughts More Green: Poems for Andrew Marvell, and in Full House, Moist Poetry Journal, Porridge, Sledgehammer Lit, and The York Journal. His debut poetry pamphlet, Variety Turns (Broken Sleep, 2024) was reviewed on TFP here. For Christopher Arksey’s Friday Poem Castaway feature he chose poems by Philip Larkin, Christopher Reid and U.A. Fanthorpe to take to his desert island. You can find him on Twitter @chrisarksey.
Image made by Andy Brodie from originals by Ali Abdul Rahman, Wynand Uys and Thom Bradley on Unsplash
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