Today’s choice
Previous poems
Kate Bailey
Us and Them
They’ve mended the park fence again,
patched it over with the usual ugly metalwork,
like a riot barricade.
That’ll keep them out –
the delinquents,
the ne’er-do-wells,
who break in and sit on the grass in the dark
and watch the moon,
the dirty buggers!
Next week it will be prised away
to leave a gap the width of a person.
Another incursion.
And those scum-of-the-earth
lying under softly budding trees,
counting the stars.
Kate Bailey is a violinist, but she has always loved words. She has two grown-up daughters, and lives in Oxford with her husband and pacifist cat. Her writing has been published in the Frogmore Papers and the Fish anthology.
Elaine Westnott-O’Brien
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Sven Stears
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Jade Prince
A Mother's Love: a contrapuntal Jade Prince is a 21 year old, recent BA English Literature with Creative Writing graduate. Over the last two years, she has fallen in love with constraint and experimental poetry. In particular, she enjoys pairing strange forms with...
Emily Rose Galvin
12.10 At precisely ten minutes past 12am, a poem was written. The location being less precise, we can say that somewhere on this, our dear planet, one poem was birthed. Pushed through crimson, through a prism of metaphor, through cranial channels...
Eve Atkinson
Timing I’m growing as slowly as Pangea broke apart invisibly, but Colossally I won’t be recognisable, save for the jagged edges of 2 lives...
Jenny Lester
Topple The Statue On the statue of Henry Dundas on the column in St Andrews Square, Edinburgh It will fall Left Onto George Street It will crush 3 cars There will be no fatalities The column will lie for 300 years The buses will be redirected...
Sue Burge
Moongirl menstruates moongirl, plump and gibbous as a bee shiny pollen bleeding silver down her starwhite moongirl, shimmering gymnast each luminous clot a tumbling planet moongirl, astride basks in the glory of her deep silver moongirl, whispers...
Madeleine Accalia
body where does all the dirt come from? I’m scared my dentist will say something is wrong I’m into skincare now over the hump of acne years everyone tells me to drink more water even the girls who have never had a spot swear by it my foot is...
John Tustin
The Balance Now is not the time for Grandiloquence. Now is not the time To gorge on suppositions, Weigh alleged propositions Or become trapped in the miasma Of the imaginary. No. Now is the time To ascertain How much time alone is too much And how...