Today’s choice

Previous poems

Pippa Little

 

 

A woman is scrubbing a grave

A woman is scrubbing a grave
but the blood remains

a woman dreams of a brown beast
driven mad and knows it is herself

a woman believes the voice in her mind
nurses the splinter of glass in her heart

a woman may defend herself
and lay herself open in the same breath

a woman’s rage cannot raise the dead
but it may split stone like lightning

 

 

 

Pippa Little‘s last collection Time Begins to Hurt came out from Arc in 2022. She’s working on her next book and teaching poetry for the Faber Academy in Newcastle.

Abiodun Salako

a boy grows tired
of dying again and again.

                                                                                                                                       i am building him a morgue
                                                                                                                                                       for Thanksgiving.

Patrick Wright

It’s as if the dream
is telling me we are still joined
somehow, despite waking
and me trudging on, even though
your voicemail is off, your locks
changed.

William Collins

We carry the shame of Paragraph 352D
folded into suitcases at foreign borders,
where love is questioned like a crime,
and disbelief stamped heavier than visas.
They tell us to run for our lives —
but only if we can do it quietly.

Oz Hardwick

The ghost of my mother knows the names of everything, but
she can’t tell me, because ghosts, whatever you have heard
to the contrary, can’t speak.

Warren Mortimer

& you’ll understand if i leave open this theatre of air
not as the invite for another loss
but to honour their world unwilling to collapse

Jena Woodhouse

Language reinvents itself,
coruscates in signs on walls;
falls silent, mute as clay and stone
on tablets that enshrine its form.