Today’s choice
Previous poems
Short Poems Feature I
Making Pierogi for My Mother
A parcel of time
the dough thinning
to not quite conceal
what it contains.
Onions and potatoes
root my floured fingers
to the earth. We consume
the ground we stand on.
Sylvie Jane Lewis writes fiction and poetry, and recently graduated with an English MPhil from Cambridge. Her work has placed in competitions (winner 2023 CUPPS Prize, runner-up 2023 Sykes Prize) and appeared in various publications. Poetry of hers features in Smashed Peaches (2023), an anthology of women and nonbinary writers on surviving violence.
today there is nothing on my to-do list
if I close my eyes I can
reach into the earth
pull it inside out like a cardigan
wear it as my peacock feathers
Jemma Walsh
Siberian Larkspur Jemma Walsh is an Irish poet based in London. She is currently doing an MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College. Her work has been published in The Irish Times, Moth Magazine, HOWL Magazine, Crossways...
Cormac Culkeen
Stay silent
under eyes of stars
quietly watching,
Rebecca Gethin
I won’t forget her on the beach – fur the colours of sand.
We wouldn’t have spotted her were it not for the jiggle
of her gait, the turn of her head with ears pricked,
the spine’s taut bow and torque of her hocks.
Sarah Hulme
you
stoop
& shell
your self
touch
in gustgasp
Sue Proffitt
You stopped the car in the lane just before our driveway.
I didn’t ask why. Chestnut trees leaned in on either side,
the damp air breathed. You sat there, looking straight ahead
and said there’s nothing worse than being queer.
Arun Jeetoo
This is how it starts.
Champion of every round,
Finlay Worrallo
one for hurting / for loveless / for rinsing yourself off afterwards
and meeting your eye in the bathroom mirror and saying firmly
you have not made a mistake / for a mistake
Sarah Greenwood
Shabby chic my body is a shipwreck blooming with coral I open my legs and out pour gold doubloons it is impossible to slam a door underwater there is an opening here fathoms deep I have made a mast of myself washed up on a beach somewhere once a...
Fiona Sanderson Cartwright
Marianne North transports the tropics to Kew She packs the globe in a wooden box, ships it to London, shrinking each place she visits to the space between her hands then draws them apart like a conjuror nectaring sunbirds out of sable hair, butterfly...