Today’s choice
Previous poems
Sally Spiers
Windless Day
Night’s white noise is over. Day arises
to stillness. Light crouches behind windows,
presses through chinks. Dawn’s chorus
conceals a speck of silence that casts a shadow
stretching vast across the floor.
Double-checking in the cereal bowls, Day reveals
emptiness disguised as a cornflake. A stale
sandwich left overnight curls at the edges.
Day crawls like a hangover along city roads,
behind mountains, trawls the dark mirror of landfill
and finds her reflection no longer ripples.
Wind has grown up and moved away,
packing every half-decent breeze and musty blow.
As if the last breath of night has stranded her high
on a cliff face. A forgotten guillemot jumpling
sits on a ledge. No-one left to encourage its leap.
Sally Spiers is retired and lives in North London. She has had poems published by the International Times, Artemesia, Brighton and Hove poetry competition, South Downs Poetry Competition and Wild Fire. She won first prize in the Charm Poetry competition 2024. She is an active member of the Peace movement and organises a London wide poetry study group.
Olivier Faivre
to a chandelier Wo viel Licht ist, ist starker Schatten. Goethe fire-drunk, you dangle like a bad metaphor: a too-ripe melon, tugging umbilical at the ceiling. your shape: just right: the élan of a soap bubble your flux: too bright: ...
Alix Scott-Martin
Founding these boys have iron bones forged in foundries tongues like metal latches hinged at the shoulders names clattering clasps on stone their forefathers knew soot as dawn light the trudge & lift of it worn in their palm lines bit lips tasting of...
Ozge Gozturk
Row Your Own Boat, Please. It’s hard to be a bird in the winter – legs dipped into cold, dirty Thames’ water. No roof to hide under. It’s hard to stand against the current to prove your fallacies, your name, under your oppressing fog. It’s hard...
Sekhar Banerjee
Of Shadows and Blebs November, the slow month, crowds the morning streets like a herd of brown ponies looking for a patch of green Ferries, laden with mint and cauliflowers, sprout on the Hooghly River like blebs on its soft skin Calcutta, full of...
David Belcher
I am about to do something bodacious Barefoot in the yard, eating a slice of buttered toast, I feel a tremor in my bones. Usually, I am full of plans, but not today. I cannot picture the future. I am carried along by the sensation that I am about...
Judith Taylor
The necklace was a gift from where they mine it out of the mountains. Haematite: an iron stone. Dense beads as grey as the metal; polished. It is cold against its wearer till it borrows some of their blood heat and if they should move too freely...
Julie Laing
Julie Laing is a Glasgow-based writer and artist. She won the 2022 Wigtown Poetry Prize and is a recent Clydebuilt Verse Apprenticeship mentee. Her work has been published in several anthologies including Gutter and The Edwin Morgan Centenary Collection. More...
Cassandra Atherton, Paul Hetherington (co-authors)
Cassandra Atherton is a widely anthologised and award-winning prose poet and scholar of prose poetry. She was a Harvard Visiting Scholar in English and a Visiting Fellow at Sophia University, and is Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin...
Rebecca Gethin
Slow Burn My mother’s life was fire, a smoulder inching along the spliced fuse of her life. Among her first words were coke and coal delivered by the black-smeared coalman who emptied sacks on his shoulders into the cellar. The chunks glistened in...