Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jean O’Brien
Spring is in the Air
Winter soil is hard and hoar crusted,
birds peck with blunted beaks,
pushing up are the blind green pods
of what will soon be yellow daffodils,
given light and air.
I wait to hear news about you,
hear that you resurfaced,
struggled up throught the ether,
your broken ribs tied tight
with titanium wire
holding your heart in place.
Your spread chest stapled together
skin taut like delicate tissue
and pocked with steel.
I am afraid with spring unfolding
you will ripen and split apart
your heart bursting with daffodils.
Jean O’Brien is an award winning poet whose latest collection Stars Burn Regardless was published by Salmon Poetry (Irl) in 2022. She was most recently shortlisted in this year’s Bridport Prize. She currently tutors in poetry/creative writing. www.jeanobrienpoet.ie
Joseph Rodgers
Snowlight A window glowing with snowlight and we’re running. Take care not to make me your caretaker. I’m just that tube you suddenly share a tunnel with before we charge into our own darknesses or are whisked into them. Stop the whistle, the...
Jim Murdoch
Weeds Needs must and so they do. Without hesitation or regret. Maslow at least got that right. Love is not a need per se. The need for love (real or imagined) is the need. Like hunger or thirst. Flowers are beautiful. Most flowers. Weeds...
Elisabeth Sennitt Clough
paradise farm don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining the for sale by auction sign says paradise farm but i know this is the yard of the house i grew up in i’m an adult tourist in my fen-poor childhood where the past crunches beneath me like...
Freyja Jones
Every time the doctor sighs looks me in the face, a faint smile playing around his lips eyes sketching scars into my cheeks as if I am nothing more than a shrunken pea another idiotic woman a googler a giver-upper a hypochondriac who loves the...
Erica Hesketh
Placenta in the beginning spiral arteries unwound a river thundered to the site where the capsule was buried, flesh into flesh, bathing the villi in blood: our first exchange within days a structure sprang up along the outermost wall, a trading...
Hannah Welfare
Firstborn My hands Are bird wings Against the soft percussion Of his heartbeat A caesarean scar Cradles my pelvis Beneath my sexless breasts Each new day Paints his vision His hand curls towards A glove A book made of rags A spoon carved from bone...
On the Twelfth Day of Christmas, we bring you Elle Dillion-Reams, Nu Dawn and My Hairy Vag
Christmas Poem Worries of the year wrapped up In non recyclable plastic paper Black Friday Sale hall of unmissable deals Our care for one another must be revealed in how we BUY for one another Spend Spend Spend We tend to the sealed boxes bright Hang The...
On the Eleventh Day of Christmas, we bring you Kathryn Alderman, Joanne Key, Fiona Larkin
New Year 2022 Lips kissed at midnight, we skitter home, twist off rimy pavements like kittens on black ice, think how returning takes forever. We try to squint at the twelvemonth ahead but our eyeballs are bobbed plums, rollicking spirit-levels...
On the Tenth Day of Christmas, we bring you Sue Burge, Marie-Louise Eyres, Sue Finch
Clara is just another girl, dreaming in her deep pink world of sugar mice and sugar plums. Young enough to fall for the charms of clockwork and blue-eyed dolls with ballerina sherbet swirls of layered net; light enough to sit on uncles’ laps,...