Today’s choice
Previous poems
Ken Evans
Octopus
I am one Like short of being beautiful.
Five hundred more Followers, I’m away
to fight culture wars. I Block two for lies
Quora does not verify. Counter-factuals
are ok, there’s simmering wastelands
to make out of vague, but someone sent
a shroom Emoji I do not understand
the meaning of, though all Emojis
are cuckoo spit on new pasture.
I love the chaste, hard summaries of AI,
all-knowing and naive as the christchild,
a friend, reading headlines in bathwater
we share and if viewed from beyond
the bathroom door, it’s hard to say where
one green, suckering leg ends and another
begins. We are like octopus in small crevices
the oceans flow through to gyrate, moil us.
Ken Evans’ collection, ‘A Full-on Basso Profundo’ (Salt) published 2025. He won the Kent & Sussex; runner-up, Daily Telegraph and AUB; commended, Cafe Writer’s. Poems in Magma, Poetry Scotland, Acumen, UtR.
Mary Mulholland
It doesn’t trust paper. It writes itself
in my head where no one can reach it,
laugh, tear it to shreds, or
call it a waste of space, a disgrace.
Afolabi Ezra
It was a quiet day—
no bad news,
no sudden loss,
no reason to hold my breath.
Karina Jutzi
I think today of the boy in choir class
who closed his eyes when we sang
about Jesus. Who swayed, as if the Lord
Isabelle Thompson
We saw a kingfisher threading the bright needle
of his body along the river. We saw a shag, stamping
her prehistoric shadow on the sky. We saw a hobby,
Roger Robinson
We walk from cane fields,
cotton in our nightshirts, sweet
Amirah Al Wassif
My double sits before me now. I stare deep into her, as I do every day after midnight. When I raise my hands, she raises hers.
Sophie Lankarani
Even though I only once traced your streets with my own feet,
you wandered into my dreams anyway
sliding in through my grandmother’s stories,
Mark A. Hill
She wills his brush in colour
and chalking, fierce hued flaws,
which fall flat on the canvas
Rebecca Wheatley
He thought his heart was broken yet the day began again.