Today’s choice
Previous poems
Piers Haben
High-Visibility
The precondition for being a ghost is not only death but faith in an afterlife. Kit Fan.
When I lost loved ones last year
I thought my childhood fears would return.
Sleeping in mum’s house waiting
for the seen and felt,
the stupid spoon on the ouija board,
cold coming into a room.
Like when I swept offices, and ran
from the room with dummies in.
But now I find the absence more terrifying.
Oh god, maybe I don’t miss them enough.
Maybe the dead move amongst us
and we hurry through the ghost city,
like commuters, eyes down,
unaware of the cleaners coming home,
the men in high-vis jackets congregating
at the edge of the floodlit road.
Piers Haben is a British poet and recovering economist, currently living on Pico Island, Azores, where his writing explores the intersections of labour and island life, whilst also physically working with stone and soil. Piers was recently shortlisted for the 2025 Wolverhampton WoLF poetry competition.
Lesley Burt
There’s a house in a suburb of between-the-wars pebble-dash & bay windows, where the soundtrack is sighs, tuts & bellows, the clash of plates & jangle of cutlery.
Gabrielle Meadows
She gets into your bed
like when she was little.
Flowers grow out of the wardrobe,
moss claims the windowsill
Alice Huntley
I had a leaf in my hair when I arrived
the receptionist thought it was a hairclip
Gemma Blakeley
My Dad Complains That The Hedges Are Overgrown
and the word bemuses me, implying as it does
the concept of excess in what can only be good.
Nick Cooke
Molluscous receivers, would that you could
turn your talents inwards, and pick up
all that goes on in the cerebral swamp . . .
Luke Moran
There’s a
flash of colour
from the hedge.
Cáit O’Neill McCullagh
And when you step into the clearing
there will be dancing. The unsteady moon, shaken
to ribbon; shimmering through regalia of clouds.
Adam Cairns
A buzzard mews, turns in the wind,
a faraway engine grumbles.
Siân Bentham
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.