Today’s choice
Previous poems
Siân Bentham
Knowledge
She doesn’t know what she is doing.
She chops and boils, snacks and sneezes, sits.
Classical radio plays, imbuing
the scene with comic dignity and wit.
I close my eyes, wrapping truths in wool and
wearing them about me. To be frank is
to be cruel, they say. They misunderstand.
Kindness is crueller. It holds a promise
of rest whilst it bludgeons the likes of me,
who have suffered quietly but madly.
And all the while she does not know what she
is doing – and nor do I exactly.
Confound it all and let the cool ones go;
I am not wretched but could be less so.
Siân Bentham is originally from South-East London. She’s an copyeditor for Wasshoi!, an online magazine about Japanese culture, and recently graduated with a degree in Geography. You may well find her in the Polish section of your local supermarket.
J.P. Lancaster
Ivy thrives
despite dependency.
It hangs on, has its other day.
Amy Dugmore
How much water did you have to drink this morning?
Did you sip your coffee without worrying
about its diuretic properties? Was it sunny
where you were?
Hannah Linden
I was cutlery left out in the rain, rusty
by morning, a side-slipping fiddlestick
desperate for music, starved for company.
Eve Chancellor
Imagine waking up one day and discovering
that you are a horse. At first, you might not
believe it and think you are dreaming.
Ananya S Guha
The leaves are growing out of
a harangue of loneliness
palms cupped I listen to silences
of winter or summers
Peter Leight
Instead of Dying I’m Taking a Trip
to Kansas
where the light appears
as if walking through a gate
in the air
Daniel Cartwright-Chaouki
Its timber frame held together by the waste
of its own decay
The rot a kind of glue undisturbed
Cracked panes of glass hold their fractures
Rosie Jackson
I Am Trying to Love Frank O’Hara More
I really am! I am trying not to see his exclamation marks as cheap melodrama and his endless conjunctions as some kind of separation anxiety or fear of mortality for what do full stops signify except dying
Charlotte Holm, Jennifer A McGowan
A leaky drainpipe drips
creating damp patches on uneven paving,
slime green algae blossoms
forming viridescent ripples