Today’s choice

Previous poems

Hannah Linden

 

 

A Philosophy of Light

Formed into darkness
an octopus squeezes around
the spaces of a shipwreck.

Light from the bloodmoon
reddens the water and the octopus
adapts and bleeds. The Earth

hadn’t planned to block the sun.
The moon can’t help how it affects
an octopus or that it seems

a particular way sometimes. Planets
follow their orbits. Moons circle
their planets. An octopus

makes sense of it as best it can,
its heart in all its tentacles,
makes its home wherever it can.

 

 

Hannah Linden won the Cafe Writers Poetry Competition 2021, 2nd Leeds Peace Poetry Prize 2024 and other prizes. Her debut pamphlet, The Beautiful Open Sky (V. Press), was shortlisted for the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet 2023. BlueSky: @hannahl1n.bsky.social

Chris Emery

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James Appleby

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Rebecca Gethin 

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Dorothy Baird

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Emma Lee

      A Pale Fire of Roses It's a child's game: knock on the door and run away. Each time she looked out, she couldn't see who'd knocked. Reporting it felt foolish: it's only a knock on the door. Fourth time and there's a bunch of flowers on the window...

Arji Manuelpillai

      True Lies My bro’s so good at dying, he shakes this way and that, dancing in the shrapnel. Mama shouts play nice so we bundle into the sofa bed, bodies clumsily naive. Arnie’s on the telly, a CIA agent, a body of nothing but muscle and man,...

Fizza Abbas

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Fiona Cartwright

      The inventor’s wife predicts a storm Each coming storm, I’m alone, love. I take to bed as my blood constricts, is corseted by whalebone. I blot the sky with clouds of my own invention and watch the day run like a shawl’s pulled thread,...

Tristan Moss

      The Stack We hold our dead like chairs hold chairs further and further off the floor until one holds no more.     Tristan Moss lives in York with his partner and two youngish children. He has recently had poems published in London...