Today’s choice
Previous poems
Katie Beswick
Can I Kiss You?
We were on my pink love seat
skin touching skin
I was drunk but longing
circled me, like stars
from a cartoon head wound
I nodded
you moved towards me
and as I parted my lips
little hesitations flew as daggers
out my mouth, though I said nothing
just let the momentous wrongness
come at you rapid, sharp
you ducked your lips were hard
and dry we tried –
oh darling we’re still trying now
the baby’s sleeping between us
and there must be some tenderness
I didn’t shred that first night
unpeeling hurts
sour as unripe oranges
you sucked them down.
Well. You said, That was the worst kiss ever.
Katie Beswick is a writer from south east London. Recent/forthcoming poems appear in Under the Radar, And Other Poems, Barrelhouse, Rattle and Narrative Magazine. Her books include Plumstead Pram Pushers (Red Ogre Review 2024) and the hybrid work of poetry, memoir, cultural history and arts criticism Slags on Stage (Routledge 2025). She teaches at Goldsmiths University of London.
Nuala Watt
Disabled Person’s Travel Card Council, council, let me on the bus That you let me on last week. Oh no Ms Watt, you can’t go on the bus For we don’t know where you live. So off I went to get proof of address And I thought I’d sorted out the mess...
Finola Scott
Testing times My bones scold-heavy, heartsick I drag my eyes anywhere - to the funeral wax of lilies, to the boastful damselflies confident in their beauty. I refuse to look at, to acknowledge, that Chair, waiting to test. Solid. I won't watch the...
DS Maolalai
A movement of flutes I'm rushing. the beer shops all close here at 10pm sharp (that’s unless you're already in them). I've been eating dinner at my parents’ tonight – with my brother and sister and both of their wives. now it's 9:45, and I've made...
Katie Martin
nocturne a note lingers a forward echo from an ancient song the lone woman on the long road carries it on with imperfect pitch a gate opens a door opens she is gone a continent away a man well-versed in parting words hums a tear into his own eye...
Hilary Watson
A Scripted Life Each day the play starts over, you making sure you’re not the protagonist, that yes, you’re listed in the credits but not under this name, or any name you might give to be scrawled on the side of a paper cup by a barista to avoid...
Kik Lodge
Foresting Grannylou steps into the forest and a thousand Grannylous greet her. A mess of baby Grannylous roll along the forest floor, plum-cheeked and pawing at squirrel tails, giggling at twenty-something Grannylous who slot themselves into...
Vera Zakharov
Ceres in the garden You wring yourself from me a sort of ripening a size-of-fist fruit pome trailing smashed seed juice you slip from my palms, lovelike my plum pudding prismatised in the light in your soft proto-placental such brilliant viscera...
Italo Ferrante
peter lacy you beg me to saturate you like oxygen in a hyperbaric chamber just a whiff of torso a lungful of animalic notes my bones smell smoky & powdery against yours don’t magnetise yourself I prefer you smaller than a nail...
Deborah Harvey
When an albatross crash-lands in a dream Long ago I saw an albatross fly head-first into a dream so fast so hard it penetrated half a mile deep. Inside the crater a wreckage of feather and bone remains which over millennia became this fossilised...