Today’s choice
Previous poems
Clive Donovan
Clive Donovan has three poetry collections, The Taste of Glass [Cinnamon Press 2021], Wound Up With Love [Lapwing 2022] and Movement of People [Dempsey&Windle 2024] and is published in a variety of magazines including Acumen, Agenda, Crannog, Ink Sweat and Tears, Popshot, Prole and Stand.
Hear Me, Hear My Silence Poetry Special: Philip Foster
The Nightwatchman Over his shoulder, I’m watching him chew sarnies out of grease-proof, at his last place of work, cracking a pack of Rich Tea. Between one snap and the next, he follows the beam of his torch, ferreting to the four corners of the...
Hear Me, Hear My Silence Poetry Special: Morag Smith
The Talk There are cheese and onion crisps in a flowered bowl, sliced tomatoes, strong tea, Mr Kipling’s Fondant Fancies, ye always loved those, all the news that matters, a family that doesn’t speak English has moved into Mrs McLeod’s God rest...
Hear Me, Hear My Silence Poetry Special: Kevin Higgins
To Stability The consultants agree your latest bloods and lung function indicate stability; that you’re likely to remain disastrously alive as a toothache buzzing like an electric saw applied to your wide-awake jaw, alive as a spinal injury that’s...
Hear Me, Hear My Silence Poetry Special Carolyn Oulton
Frenemy Ever noticed how your legs stop moving when you fly? As a crow makes a sudden dive up through the mirror. I too have mapped my body against clouds of glass, masked like a surgeon on the Canterbury 17. On arrival she says she’ll cut my...
Hear Me, Hear My Silence Poetry Special: Alice Murray
Sonic Boom It knocked you for seven in the frozen aisle. It wasn’t sound. It was faster than that. You’re going through the ice box, rooting for peas when, with a BOOM, you have your life play the drums in your ears. You hear the past crackle...
Judith Taylor
Luciferins Yeah: all the colours crowding the daylight claiming their own place in the sun and then there's us reacting with oxygen to make our own position clear, our own availability gorgeous. Pride? Yeah: why not, we say as we spark the...
Bob Cooper
How, tonight, a Detective Sergeant’s Wife will have her sadness taken from her Leaning back, sipping coffee to keep awake, he’s evaluating witness statements, incident reports of suspected criminal activity, photos of indistinct footprints, and knows...
Beth Brooke
The Birdman at Manchester Airport Makes His Confession 1962, Elisabeth Frink, Manchester Arrivals Hall We are envious, full of longing, incapable of looking at the setting of a raspberry-peach sun without desire. We want to hurl ourselves into...
Clive Donovan
Park At night in the dreary park empty swings the roundabout on well- greased gimbal manages to budge a little I tread the slight bounce of reconstituted tyre at the slide's base rakish boys and girls sip from a single bottle spark up a cigarette...