Today’s choice
Previous poems
Peter Daniels
It Might Never Happen
This is not you, but someone soaked in fake Brut
coming at me in a gesture of fake generosity.
For goodness sake, I only want a quiet life,
it’s no crime not to be a gregarious joiner.
Ultra-polite, ultra-wary, I don’t answer back
but here’s my response to the world in general:
My scowl isn’t personal, it’s just the shape
of my face, and when I smile it’s genuine.
Does not-drinking make me some kind of puritan?
If I could drink gin I’d like it for its whiff of juniper.
I don’t have to take part in their great train robbery
or their tea party trying to be sweet and genteel.
I want you, but I can enjoy Christmas Day on my own
and emerge unsmiling, ready for grey-skied January.
Peter Daniels’ fourth collection is Old Men (Salt, 2024). He has translated Vladislav Khodasévich from Russian, and as queer writer in residence at the London Archives wrote the obscene historical Ballad of Captain Rigby. www.peterdaniels.org.uk
Emma Farmer
Your face was on a bus pass,
your hair falling around your face like a curly straw,
pressed in a puddle between the Queen’s old face
and an Aldi receipt for slippers and chicken.
Carson Wolfe
I owned a g-string like this,
the back connected by a rhinestone butterfly.
Starved myself at school to save
my dinner money, bought it from Poundland.
Poetry from Gurmeet Kaur, UEA’s Birch Family Scholar 2025/2026
I kill lines of ant. Heat arrives
in the wrong season. It feels important
to know the names of birds under
the thrum of a flight corridor.
Sarah Nathan
The ash that screams into the night,
the lake that dries, the child amongst the rubble,
the heat, the fire, the lack of books,
Anna Bowles
Akademichna Street
is bombed-out flats, is
the hot-pink Sweet Bakery Café, is
straggly new-planted trees, is
Philip Athans
Never shows up late to a single thing he’s invited to
Always brings the most thoughtful and carefully curated and perfect gift
Never shows up early and never once overstays his welcome
Always appears well groomed and clean and appropriately dressed
Michelle Diaz
This is just a woman,
sticking her life back together
after years spent recovering.
Autumn Richardson
What you are –
bodied light, a store of oil
a hive of warm blood
Rebecca Parfitt
In the back of the taxi on my way to the hospital,
thighs clenched together,
the driver asked me,
