Today’s choice
Previous poems
Ian Seed
Draenog
What was the Welsh for ‘hedgehog’? That was what he wanted to know. It was a word he could only remember in his sleep when he dreamt of himself as a small boy, barefoot, back in 1966. The sun was shining. He was wandering across fields and streams, and then what seemed like forever along a winding lane. It was only when he found a hedgehog, dead, stuck to the tarmac with its own flesh, that he realised he had no idea how to find his way back to the campsite where his mum would be making tea. A car swept by. Black bits cut into the soles of his feet.
Ian Seed’s most recent publications include Forgetfulness (Shearsman, 2026), My Outsize Hank Williams Cowboy Hat, with artwork by Lupo Sol (Sacred Parasite, 2025), and The Dice Cup, from the French of Max Jacob (Wakefield, 2023). Find him at www.ianseed.co.uk
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...
Alice Stainer
Willow Woman After ‘The Huntress of Skipton Castle Woods’ by Anna & the Willow Pliant yet unyielding—there’s steel at my core— I’m fixed in the flex of blown breeze, leaf ripple. Hems besom discarded leaves, gathering them in as kin, and I’m...
Nia Broomhall
Tetris We’re there on the midnight pavement with the amps and the guitars, the kit and the cables, remember, you and Drew and Tom and James and me, after that gig— instead of the bus the taxi driver turns up in this car like your mum’s and...
Ann Heath
A very small thing. I found your fingernail creased inside the poetry I read to you. A dry paring, thin crescent, white as a hospital tag, cut when you could still fight me, with your vowels and yelping, with the stricture of your hands. I...