Today’s choice
Previous poems
Bill Jones
Three Jackdaws
Three jackdaws walked widdershins
around the birdfeeding station. A fat woodpigeon,
pompous, hieratic,
tried to undo their magic
by walking from four to six. For a moment,
the two birdfeeders, full of seeds and nuts,
were the pillars of the Temple.
I wondered what it spelled for the day ahead
as I watched their spells, this augury-pokery.
Bill Jones is a poet and illustrator who lives in Gloucestershire, UK, with a small dog and an interest in magic. His poems have appeared in anthologies from Yew Tree Press and his cartoons have appeared in Private Eye and Poetry Review.
Penny Boxall
Post The days that follow, we both receive from you a letter. Jane’s was waiting in a bleary mailbox shuttered with snow, having crossed westbound while she hurried east. You couldn’t wait for spring. Mine was older, slipped with a tenner in an...
Constantin Preda
Gentrification Remember when hell was a thing? You could look it up in Dante, or better still in a history book you could extrapolate from The Geneva Convention. Remind me the tell you the story of the middle manager who unironically, referred to...
Alexander Etheridge
Lost is the Story Everyone loses their time at the same rapid speed—it’s like flying shrapnel, or a quickly strobing light. We’re all moving into another life, another dying. The oceans feel it too— and every tree churns quietly in its center with...
Juliet Humphreys
Mrs Hitchcock Takes a Bath I’m not so sure about showers — if you must know it’s the sound how it rushes, pounding, drowning everything and, dear, sometimes — I know it’s probably only the pipes — but sometimes it screams so I’ll just take a bath...
Rachel Curzon
Mrs Yeats’ Love Letters from the Other Side Mrs Yeats slackens carefully in her comfortable front room. Perhaps her slow arm drags a lace antimacassar from a sofa back. Perhaps her lips part in an O. Mrs Yeats unfolds and sags. Where is Mr Yeats?...
Judith Wozniak
Surveillance She heard it again last night, a rattle wrapped in the rain, pebble-dashing the window. A scrabble outside her door, calling her name. Eyes peer through the letter box. Somebody moves her clothes, tears her magazines. She keeps watch at her...
Caspar Bryant
Forgiveness clay-sifting one wellyboot year to make him the pizza oven, I was forgiven, wading through the midges encrusted with sun- light sifting leaves & I seven or eight scoured the bank in slow flow fingers freeze beachspade hefted...
Duncan Forbes
Pond in June Among the lily-pads’ congested leaves, above the pond, white water-lilies flower, their yellow stamens in bright asterisks like fried eggs somehow learning origami and, coloured like a childish sun or star, unblinkingly each water-lily...
Suzanne Marie Iuppa
Planting Fields In those days when we couldn’t touch each other— instead— we dug the earth the spacer we passed marked— the ideal measure— in black mark— tuber— here pass the spacer in sunlight or make another—wood with raw black— no touch but we...