Today’s choice
Previous poems
Rose Ramsden
The Last Train Home
We left the play early. It was the last day before the start of secondary school. Dad told me off for slapping the seats, wanting to see the dust rise like smoke. Floating to the ceiling, dirtying the lights. The doors hissed open and a stranger emerged. Approached with a stare that unwrapped the skin from my bones, trickled down the neckline of my shirt. He held out a hand to my dad and grinned. Gums like the flesh left on cherry pits. I gazed at the ugly pattern on my seat. The filth beneath, festering.
Rose Ramsden is a UK based poet currently studying for her Creative Writing Masters at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her work has been previously published by bathmagg, The Punch Magazine, and dubble, among others. You can find her on Instagram @RoseRamsden.
Sarah Davies
The Curse I bless you love, like the bee is blessed in honey, though, in the hive, the beekeeper has seen the bees drowning in honey. Is this a blessing, a dying from cloy and sugar, surely, slowly? Or, is it this, this, as you will see, the...
John McKeown
In Rut Eaten alive, being me I step into the street Where November leaves are falling. The air is fine, the clear sky As finely brittle; the aroma of late decay A delicate call to loving. Shed of worries I tread the cobblestones with antlers...
Andrew Pidoux
The Cyclist’s Breed of Freedom Cycling the five miles to work under the blue sky of something like summer, I see hundreds of cars going past me in a blur of metal and memory. The garden greens and reds of the traffic lights hush me over and under...
Jenny Robb
Everything You Need to Know about Australian Magpie Swooping Season Protecting your baby is natural – and it’s the same for magpies. The black and white swoop loosens her grip. Here’s how to avoid their protective swoop. She drops her baby....
Jenny Hockey
Damp after Christmas and us on the bench with a downhill view of the back of our house, the running curve of the street, us with a view of windows, the windows we stand behind, tracking the passage of prams, of people with tools for allotments,...
Chris Emery
Rooms Inside the sweet and charmless one, the filthy one, the room with flies or night wasps singing far too high. Shutterless and bleached and all-too-ready-rooms, the gassy room, fitted out with pique and sorrow, the one cascading with cries and...
James Appleby
Happening Locally Because the park has hidden the place, the parents of fashionable dogs won’t know. Because the grass has covered up the mud where the knees slid, the couple holding hands won’t know. Because the sirens are quiet, the officers...
Rebecca Gethin
Cep Some years I miss the days of its fruiting or else it doesn’t show: a sign of what’s going on underground how hylae and mycelia are faring. Beneath pines at the woodland edge where a little light comes in its soft egg protrudes meaty and...
Dorothy Baird
Subtraction of Grief Yesterday I slipped into a broken space the wind couldn’t mend. Beside me the reservoir dazzled in the cold sunshine and larch trees losing their copper needles in the fleecing gusts were still, are always, all one in...