Today’s choice
Previous poems
Charlotte Oliver
Repeat
On a bench outside Next,
a punctured woman
traces circles in the air with
a pale finger
while her thoughts leak out
in a rill of mutterings.
Nobody sees her
in the busy emptiness
of lunchtime. Inside
my pocket
two small shells – they
are chalky, finely ridged.
I feel the edge of their curve
over and over
like a chant.
In the car park
the ticket machine says,
Change is possible.
Charlotte Oliver writes for adults and children. A New Northern Poet (2023), she is one of The Poetry Society’s Poets in Schools. Her first full collection My Hands Are Still Just Petals is forthcoming with Valley Press in Oct. 2026.
Peter Devonald
He is bitterest regrets,
dark chocolate, olives and kale,
The Telegraph and Magritte’s
pipe, the treachery of images.
Anne Ryland
Restless two-hundred-year-old village elder,
a ragged playground of words, or is it weeds –
fragments of chant to slaps of skipping rope.
Colin Dardis
I have never climbed a tree,
never broken a bone
and will never walk on water.
May Garner
The house keeps score
in places no one checks any longer.
Sally Spiers
Night’s white noise is over. Day arises
to stillness. Light crouches behind windows
Tim Brookes
In the charity shop I try on a coat
flocked with fake shearling,
shaved-soft almost: fibres
fired onto plastic to fool the wrist.
Kim Waters
You’re a character, a Roman numeral,
an internet meme. Descendant
from a peasant’s crook or cattle prod,
you’re the twelfth letter of the alphabet,
Sylvie Jane Lewis
Being quiet and easily tired by being alive among people, I take
the cowardly route to community. I curate a digital garden of oddity.
At best my phone is a menagerie of queers: trinket makers, amateur
playwrights, witches, and, over and over again, my own personal monarchy.
Maryam Alsaeid
Maybe after your bath—
you will sit for a moment,
the towel will hold you close
like a quiet prayer—