Today’s choice
Previous poems
Isabelle Thompson
‘Attention, after all is prayer’ (Jo Bell)
We saw a kingfisher threading the bright needle
of his body along the river. We saw a shag, stamping
her prehistoric shadow on the sky. We saw a hobby,
compact, fierce, not a sinew out of place, alert and spare,
watching us from his high vantage. All these were miracles,
but miraculous too was the stag beetle, thick and black,
gleaming against the white snowdrops; miraculous
and strange was the rat in the car park who sat
licking her tiny paws, her soft brown body touched
with beads of rain, her eyes dark as holes, hypnotic,
calling to us to watch her, note her unnoticed loveliness.
Isabelle Thompson is a graduate of Bath Spa University’s MA in Creative Writing, where she now works as a research assistant on programmes related to storytelling. Her debut pamphlet, Stalin’s Parrot, is published in May 2026 by Poetry Space.
Adrienne Wilkinson
big safe knives her greedy hands cook for me slicing limes into such thin wheels ginger honey sesame to steam in this english culture with the least amount of time to cook in all of europe as she eats i touch her hands and feel grease the salt of...
Cáit O’Neill McCullagh
THE MOTHER TREE Go to the pine to learn of the pine ̶ Matsuo Bashō Spring empties us of snow, spits us winter-lean Fat gritted rhizomes, our roots upend feeble as sea foamed on rock fast with limpet full dulse. & we swing sparse growth...
Pam Thompson
Hotel Blue (after John Ash) 1. Above each of the sea-facing windows of Hotel Blue, a canopy. At night the smell of fish and vinegar. It’s a good place to fall out of love, fall in love with someone else, a good place to tip out clutter from your bag or pockets....
Tom Branfoot
I work in a former abattoir code switching like it’s going out of fashion yawns sieved through my terrazzo mouth sunless mornings one bus every hour peopled with rage rainwaxed floors slippery as heritage once I would have cut myself like a...
Patrick Deeley
Sean’s Ghost leans over the garden wall next the hairpin bend to hand me a rosy apple with the same gesture he himself showed of a stumblebum evening when I was a child making my way home after a bad day at school. Though the apple holds no substance now, and...
Sophia Argyris
HERONLESS I look for him from the foot bridge he's not in any of his usual places not mid-stream in shallows not below the arch under the road not at the corner on a stony outcrop the fishes are swimming undeterred and the day feels so...
Jessica Mookherjee
Second Generation Upgrade I take an invisible dog on holiday to the coast, with raven feather tied to my hair and a new iphone in my bag, my passport is ready for a quick get away, and I must look a sight in these snow-boots and sunset skin. I ask...
Dane Holt
Dane Holt’s poems have been published in Poetry Ireland Review, The Trumpet, The White Review, Stand, bath magg, One Hand Clapping , Anthropocene and elsewhere. He is poetry editor of The Tangerine, a Belfast magazine of new...
Jean O’Brien
The Arrow that Flies by Day (Psalm 91) To my first readers I present fragments, half- rhymes, vowels, words, somewhere a metronome beats time and we split the line into syllables, metric feet, then come the myths and metaphors, music sounds near....