Today’s choice
Previous poems
Susan Elizabeth Hale
Cup
Sometimes words are the only thing
that get you through,
But not the words you think,
not a word like love or hope
those are imprecise.
It’s more a word like window
or fenêtre
even curtain
words that are more certain,
that have weight on the tongue
that you feel through the teeth
puffs of air
that set off plosives in the mouth
Rilke was right
we are on this Earth to say
fountain
Sometimes it’s the sound of a voice
you’ve heard for seventy-four years
or since 8th grade
a sound that sets something in motion
like a harp string plucked
a name like Susanna
or Ian,
names that have origin in the body
that rise and generate
names that find you through the night
When words like broken
frozen
alone
stretch too far on the horizon
we need a word like cup
to bring us in from the cold
American ex-pat, Susan Elizabeth Hale has found her home in Ledbury and is a member of the Stanza Hereabouts. She has been published here and there and won third place in the Winchester Writer’s poetry competition in 2018. She is completing her first book.
Freya Cook
You Eat a Moon as a Metaphor for Pain Here’s what’s going to happen: the moon is going to fall out of the sky and land in the basketball court in front of the apartment where your dad died. You are going to swallow it. Here’s what you are going to do: be buried under...
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...