Today’s choice

Previous poems

Annie Acre

Solarpolar

i am sun-shot / green-beamed / stem-steep /
hands cupfuls of heartlines / conjuring water /
my face light-dialled / hair wild /
screaming beauty

&

i am root-retched / soiled-deep / dirt-dark /
legs spindly – lost maplines / petering earth /
my thirst worm-cursed / blackburst /
mulching ugly

Annie Acre is a surveyor/poet. She performs spoken word around Manchester and works on Council regeneration projects. She loves wordplay and town halls and townplay and wordhalls. She hopes you like what she’s doing with the place. @surveyorpoet surveyorpoet.co.uk

Melanie Branton

      my brilliant boyfriend told me you’re not very intelligent, you only got good grades because you’re a conformist that’s the text we had to learn, boys are vowels girls are consonants, boundaries, sheepdogs, only there to hold the vowels together,...

Kenneth Pobo

      Mrs. Panterluck says she doesn’t know why she keeps dis- appearing.  One minute she’s in a mall walking over to a perfume kiosk and the next she’s gone.  It’s like she misplaces her skin.  Wherever she is, she retains a brain, though Mr....

Ruth Aylett

      Graphic Designs He arrives in a pixellated taxi so low-res he could be any of the men who’d tried to resize her round the axis of their doubts. Her fractal word within a word within a word, too small for her own resolution, plinks into the glass...

Caleb Parkin

      Queertopia (Working Title) i dreamt it once     but i dream a lot of things     not all of them printable     but this was some kind of culty shit well      no        the good bits of a cult     if you can say cults have    redeeming features i...

Philip Dunkerley

      Good Neighbour Irecê, Brazil An entrepreneur, he ran a butcher’s stall in the market. So you could see the meat he’d waft the flies away with his hand. We rented a house from him; he showed us the covered tank in the yard - that’s where the truck...

Steve Griffiths

      Your artificial light gave out Your garden has no security, just the electronic sensor that whispers in husky unpredictable clicks that accompany the moths feeding in the darkness. To your mind, to my mind the world of the moths will be...

David Punter

      Neighbourhood News Hi, I’m Bill. I’ve just moved in to that little house on New Street (you know the one, it’s been covered in graffiti for God knows how long). I’ve got six dogs and a dead rabbit which I keep in the fridge as well as lots of...

Gurpreet Bharya

      Imagining myself as a bitter, old woman   Here I am as old as you said I would grow altogether alone drinking tea curled up with a gossip of stars and the milky thaw of the moon – the thrum of the air still thrums in me as the flowers fold in...

Louise Mather

      Afflictions   I swallow the seams of the moon – they have always riddled me, if I lay on a stage of feathers I would still feel the underneath of dark atoms, afflictions you pull from the bridge only when god has given you to the water....