Today’s choice

Previous poems

Charles G. Lauder

 

 

 

Craftsmanship

beneath night’s skin he unearths raw stones
serrated     encrusted    enigmatic    cold

tumbling them in two-twenty grit wears away the dull
four hundred    six hundred highlights the delicate

garnet’s exposed seam     agate’s brittle dendrites
whilst softest serpentine disintegrates to dust

in quiet solitude he worries
facets of captured moonlight won’t be enough

in the age of electric light    blue light
boutiques and diners that never shut

the glow of irrelevance radiates

 

 

Charles G. Lauder, Jr, is an American poet who lives in the UK. He’s the author of the collection The Aesthetics of Breath (V.Press, 2019) and three pamphlets, the most recent being Year of the Rat (Blueprint Poetry Press, 2025).

Annie Powell Stone

      dis)connecting do not disturb is a phone setting and a feeling as I set out the evening breeze biting my cheek is an invitation I walk until I remember how to find shapes in clouds until I can smell the sweat on my upper lip until I can really...

Camille McCawley

    Maungawhau Fed up with sitting dormant I shove my legs into compression tights double knot laces and leave the house for the first time in weeks. At the base of Mount Eden I muster the strength to move through its shadow. Pounding against the hard ground...

Elaine Westnott-O’Brien

      Present Good love is not always easy.  It is driving rain and wind A small vessel in stormy seas Drowning Good love is not always hard.  It is melting chocolate in the sun A slow, languorous heat Rising Good love is not always certain. It is a...

Sven Stears

      vii) spray paint                    (Canto from Larger work – PHYLACTERY) accidentally italian again nozzle flecked in tricolore borrowed back                 from the streets of bristol                 and new york grubbier somehow embossed with...

Jade Prince

A Mother's Love: a contrapuntal Jade Prince is a 21 year old, recent BA English Literature with Creative Writing graduate. Over the last two years, she has fallen in love with constraint and experimental poetry. In particular, she enjoys pairing strange forms with...

Emily Rose Galvin

      12.10 At precisely ten minutes past 12am, a poem was written. The location being less precise, we can say that somewhere on this, our dear planet, one poem was birthed. Pushed through crimson, through a prism of metaphor, through cranial channels...

Eve Atkinson

      Timing I’m growing as slowly as             Pangea broke             apart invisibly, but                                                        Colossally I won’t be recognisable, save for the jagged                           edges of 2 lives...

Jenny Lester

      Topple The Statue On the statue of Henry Dundas on the column in St Andrews Square, Edinburgh It will fall Left Onto George Street It will crush 3 cars There will be no fatalities The column will lie for 300 years The buses will be redirected...

Sue Burge

      Moongirl menstruates moongirl, plump and gibbous as a bee shiny pollen bleeding silver down her starwhite moongirl, shimmering gymnast each luminous clot a tumbling planet moongirl, astride basks in the glory of her deep silver moongirl,  whispers...