A Parliament of Apples was published by Sherwood Handcraft in April 2026.
 
Purchase for £6.00
 
It’s always a pleasure to read something from Mick Jenkinson. He is a songwriter of considerable ability as well as a poet and brings a musicality to everything he writes. His latest collection, A Parliament of Apples brings a host of previously unpublished pieces together with a number of poems that he has had published online in recent years – Mike O’Brien, Sixty-odd Poets
 
Parliament
 
You halve an apple with a paring knife,
its cut face looking back at you,
the pips positioned perfectly as eyes,
its blank stare echoing your own.
 
How often you’ve performed this simple task
and never realised. Disorientated,
you reach to take another from the bowl,
repeat the work and there it is, the same.
 
You feel adrift; this fruit should be supine.
You hack at others with a mounting dread,
each Braeburn you bisect returns your gaze,
inflaming your compulsion to escape.
 
You leave them all, discarded on the worktop;
aware though, how they track your every move.
You reach the door, switch off the light and turn,
as now the memory shudders to the brim:
 
a cold and starless night when you were young,
afraid and lost in unfamiliar woods,
those terrifying eyes that swooped and sliced
the black: a parliament of apples.