Today’s choice
Previous poems
Katie Beswick
Can I Kiss You?
We were on my pink love seat
skin touching skin
I was drunk but longing
circled me, like stars
from a cartoon head wound
I nodded
you moved towards me
and as I parted my lips
little hesitations flew as daggers
out my mouth, though I said nothing
just let the momentous wrongness
come at you rapid, sharp
you ducked your lips were hard
and dry we tried –
oh darling we’re still trying now
the baby’s sleeping between us
and there must be some tenderness
I didn’t shred that first night
unpeeling hurts
sour as unripe oranges
you sucked them down.
Well. You said, That was the worst kiss ever.
Katie Beswick is a writer from south east London. Recent/forthcoming poems appear in Under the Radar, And Other Poems, Barrelhouse, Rattle and Narrative Magazine. Her books include Plumstead Pram Pushers (Red Ogre Review 2024) and the hybrid work of poetry, memoir, cultural history and arts criticism Slags on Stage (Routledge 2025). She teaches at Goldsmiths University of London.
Kate Hendry
So what if there’s a dead patch.
Remember the havoc
unfettered fire makes –
Christtie Jay
My Lord, let the record show
she remembered everyone else
before this. If you must, take her
in teaspoons
May Grier
I wasn’t to know
that it was a three-tusked
beast; that there was not one,
not two, but three
that grew the seed of me.
Daniel Hill
On her first day home, she took
to plucking the sky with tweezers—
latched on to clouds and waited
Sheila Saunders
Which is the subject?
Limp-leaved yucca
reluctantly dying,
the foreground figure
in its stony pot?
Trelawney
What is holding you back from building your wormery?
You can’t say there isn’t the time. Everyone has the time
when it comes to a wormery. Born with the right tools to hand.
David Van-Cauter
…4am and the birdsong begins, a wet January in a new city and I’m alone watching a man in Minnesota, murdered for protecting a woman from a fascist hit squad. . .
Tim Dwyer
Unexpectedly
My neighbour
opens her window
for fresh salty air
Paul Moclair
Their shore leave over,
. . . the spirits of the dead are bid farewell
until that time next year, when ritual
grants them reprieve again.