Today’s choice
Previous poems
Ken Evans
Octopus
I am one Like short of being beautiful.
Five hundred more Followers, I’m away
to fight culture wars. I Block two for lies
Quora does not verify. Counter-factuals
are ok, there’s simmering wastelands
to make out of vague, but someone sent
a shroom Emoji I do not understand
the meaning of, though all Emojis
are cuckoo spit on new pasture.
I love the chaste, hard summaries of AI,
all-knowing and naive as the christchild,
a friend, reading headlines in bathwater
we share and if viewed from beyond
the bathroom door, it’s hard to say where
one green, suckering leg ends and another
begins. We are like octopus in small crevices
the oceans flow through to gyrate, moil us.
Ken Evans’ collection, ‘A Full-on Basso Profundo’ (Salt) published 2025. He won the Kent & Sussex; runner-up, Daily Telegraph and AUB; commended, Cafe Writer’s. Poems in Magma, Poetry Scotland, Acumen, UtR.
Matt Nicholson
Birdsong in the playground I asked a sea-gull on a see-saw what’s it all for, what’s it all about? He said nowt and flew away. I asked a crow on a swing the self-same thing, but he refused to say anything, he just hopped off to the roundabout,...
Maggie Mackay
She believes herself to be a field creature Nessie is losing her mind boiling cotton with bleach all year long. She stalks lands and fields at twilight, fashions a dress from a beetle’s shell. The women in the dormitories don’t sleep a jot for...
Holly Bars
Holly Bars is a mature student currently studying at the University of Leeds. Holly’s poems have been published since January 2021 by The Moth, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Fragmented Voices, Porridge, Anti-Heroin Chic, Visual Verse, Runcible Spoon, and more, as...
David Hensley
The Waiting Game Waiting is a great leveller. sitting in the waiting room, differences of height and status are almost invisible: we are equally powerless, subservient to the unseen list and the occasional calls of doctors and administrators....
Ryan Norman
Garden I’ve woken at peace; it’s important not to think. I return instead to familiar images; steam rising from the boiler below the house, the pale leaves on the tree whose name I never learned. All I’ve ever done with these things is try to know...
Iris Anne Lewis
Consider the snowdrop How it toils through barren months, withstands snow and frost with alchemy of proteins and alkaloids in its sap. How it forges lance-shaped leaves hard-tipped to pierce frozen earth, gifts fresh growth to shaded places. How...
Marc Woodward
Hope is for a smile. Not the cheery smile of The medication is excellent these days but the broad smile of You can go home now, everything is fine. Hope is getting up and checking yourself knowing that one day soon you'll be worse - but not today?...
Kurt Sweeney
Forest Facial If I’m not rock, then I’m depth letters, If I’m not stone, then I’m clean persuasion, If I’m not dark, then I’m chisel and mallet, If I’m never cerebral, then I’ll be static weather. So blow in my direction, Wear down my features,...
Heidi Beck
Self-Portrait as Road Runner You with your elaborate schemes of entrapment, your hunting parties, moonshine and shot-gun weddings, your Sunday-school socials for girls to glue birdseed and pasta on prayer plaques, sew aprons with Singers– this desert was...