Today’s choice
Previous poems
Michelle Diaz
Mum was
a raised axe and a party hat.
A Victorian wardrobe
packed with 1960s kaftans.
She was the twist and the shout,
the let it all hang out.
She was convent school and wine cellar.
She was a month of Ryvitas followed by
a year of cake & Babycham.
She was four and twenty firm rules
baked in a council house.
Mum was a full purse/an empty purse.
A frightened holdall.
A sacred heart and a sacrificial lion.
A feast and famine. A heated face in the kitchen.
Mum was an infectious laugh in a telephone box.
An abandoned church.
She was suspected lock-jaw/diphtheria/cancer.
She was as straightforward as trigonometry,
clever as a calculator.
She was the planet we orbited,
the centrifugal force.
She was The Big Bang.
And a fathomless black hole.
Michelle Diaz has been published in numerous journals both online and in print, e.g 14 Magazine, Under the Radar and Poetry Wales. She has been shortlisted for Best of the Net and nominated for Forward Prize Single Poem category. She can be found on Twitter and Blue Sky.
Robert Nisbet
Tones A story in three remembered voices These were the voices which really seemed to shift things. She went, in her finals year, to a surgery, painted pre-war brown and cream, along from the Mumbles pier. There she heard the fat doctor, beaming...
Mona Bedi
Four Haiku * a date with myself inside the fortune cookie a love note * migraine... the storm fails to subside * museum tour my husband lingers at the kamasutra painting * renovation I refuse to remove the pigeon's nest Mona Bedi is...
Glenn Hubbard
Outcrops Heaps topped by smaller rocks. The raffish angles of designer boulders. Jenga towers of tipsy stone. Lizard colony. Ombligo de Venus. Navelwort in paradise. Darkness; damp. Foxgloved fissures. Small pools filling fingerholds: finger...
Olivia Tuck
Vaccine The needle hits the deltoid with a moon-cold urgency; its jolt of fluid is ice barely thawed. Relax – sharp scratch. I hold myself against this detergent-white light. On the journey home, my pupils dilate: for the first time in months, I...
Kathleen McPhilemy
The Poetry Arm Today was all left-handed. I’ve slapped it on the wrist, wrapped what it’s written, hidden in a file, locked behind a password: a little bomb of bitterness I couldn’t post online. My left hand’s the clumsy one blundering on the...
Lalah-Simone Springer
How to pronounce Dagenham For Jodie Chesney First relax ur froat, ur maaf, ur vibe Not much to do about not much to do so ya chat shit: Wiv ya white shirt unbuttoned over West Ham strip Clanging pawnshop platinum on a baby blackbird’s chest. Narmy...
Sarah Davies
Fond The Earth is not even fond of us anymore or the Goddess or the bees or the glowing children. Only dogs entertain a tolerance for us - we earned it over time, blackmail of bones and treats, but some dogs want to bite, recalling, howl, they...
Poulami Somanya Ganguly
Here I am, again after John Yau & the room is cold with its geometry of faces a child looks through cellophane & imagines an escape a place moves in time like a needlepoint on water often it’s hard to tell what’s real from reflection as a...
Anuradha Vijayakrishnan
Brief moments of light We walked by that lake each evening, within an inch of holding hands. Tiny firefish rushed to water’s edge to taste the aftermath of our feet. Vagrant water hyacinth and lonely snakebirds listened as we talked and talked....