Today’s choice
Previous poems
Magnus McDowall
Seven Sisters Road
We rolled out on Seven Sisters Road,
two crates of Tyskie empty in my stairwell.
We were talking from the chest, walking backwards
crackling air above our heads like streetlights
beatboxing, spitting Maccies adverts at us
sounds of microwaves and ice cream makers,
night producing jitters in security guards
and a backing track to later chatting up
the leng ones round a table, telling them
we’re long-term ones, wealthy ones, footballer ones
before another pack walk in with their 501s,
Air Force Ones, giving worse grief to the cashier –
nights like these have a habit of splitting into shards.
Cleaved apart by a comment or a look that leaves
you picking up the shrapnel of a headbutt from the pavement
explaining to the officer that it wasn’t your lot who started it.
In the morning you’ll glue the muddle into a mosaic, imagining
steel in the space where your spine might have been.
Magnus McDowall is a poet from London. His poems have appeared in magazines, films, festivals and this campaign for Queens Park Rangers Football Club. His reviews can be found at Writers Mosaic, a division of the Royal Literary Fund.
Laura Gibbs
Daffodils Smarmy cunts. Hiding from me, in chattering spheres, year-round spectres of a season delayed. Budding in a darkness unknown - I will remember numbness. A yellow that melts, butter upon frost, their smooth openings jar in the aisles of...
Rachel Bruce
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Catherine Redford
Death’s Head Moth The effect is to produce the most superstitious feelings among the uneducated, by whom it is always regarded with feelings of awe and terror. ‘The Death’s-Head Hawk-Moth’, in Edward Newman’s An Illustrated Natural History of...
Jessa Brown
Wulf and Eadwacer’s Daughter Make Meatballs after the Old English poem Jessa Brown, a UEA creative writing MA student, has been an Acumen Young Poet. Her work has been published in the Brixton Review of Books, The Mays, and Young Writers,...
Vasiliki Albedo
Our Country Our house was a country my parents founded but none of us were citizens. Nights, the corridor’s iron gate was a border, locking us in our rooms. My mother was both state and warden. I wrapped a hair around my diary before leaving for...
Joanna Wright
Joanna Wright lives in the Scottish highlands. Her poems have been published in Northwords Now and Spelt Magazine.
Jenny Hockey
Bonding I carried you home as if you were an extra bag I might have required while taking my time over shopping — both of us newly hatched on the sun-filled hospital ward. By the time I arrived in the kitchen, the men had already begun on the...
From the IS&T Archive for Father’s Day: Caleb Femi
This poem was first published on IS&T on 15th July 2018. Rose of Jericho I am waiting for water; do not blame my Father though he made me a curling spine of dried roots. In a home not built for foliage he did his fatherly duty to pass on only what is necessary to...
Ann Grant
Confessions to a neurologist When it started, I’d tip my chin down to my chest, loving the sensation of my body buzzing. I’d wake, fall to the wall, panic crawl to the loo, ask my wife if my palms were really burning hot I choke on nothing but...