Today’s choice
Previous poems
Joshua Seigal
The Last Olive
I offer you the last olive.
Have it yourself, you say.
Don’t be ridiculous, I reply –
just take it. I saved it for you.
You bite into the olive,
your teeth working their way
around the hard interior.
You eat half of it
and hand the other half over.
The rest is yours, you say.
I savour the flesh –
this gift I’ve been given.
Joshua Seigal is best known as a children’s author and poet, and has several full collections published with Bloomsbury. His work for a ‘grown up’ audience has been Highly Commended in the 2026 Poetry Wales Award, and he recently released his debut pamphlet, wryly entitled The Relationship Expert, as a free digital publication, which can be downloaded here: https://archive.org/details/
Eileen Carney Hulme
Yes I was a canary girl
who survived the accidents
the explosions, even the chemicals
didn’t poison me.
Kevin Denwood
The dead flies collected
on the windowsill
like punctuation.
SJ Lunn-Rockliffe
Crammed onto his high
stone square, he cranes
to see the whole number
of eternity as it unwinds
Julia Webb
The magic people are coming, you said.
You took us outside and pointed at the sky.
Ella B. Winters
Across the road stands a woman
wearing a child on her heart,
Jaymz Lea
My mum always says, I get where water wouldn’t.
When he drank me, I left myself somewhere sunken
John Grey
Mountains behind us,
the land spreads out, flat and brittle,
like a discarded snakeskin.
Ian C. Webb
Two table’s worth of no-longer strangers
at dusk on a lane of nautical miles
basket of bread, bottles of wine, talk of home
and places called home
Ned Vessey
My father and I
skim the surface of conversations
something like those swallows do
down at the lake