Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jo Eades
Bin Day
It’s Wednesday and / again / I’m laying pages of newspaper on the kitchen table / tipping up the food waste bin / scattering teabags and potato peelings and orange pith in a pile / and wrapping it up like chips from the chippy / so the foxes won’t smell it and tip it over / and the gulls won’t spread it across the street / and I’m wondering / again / why you never remember when it’s Wednesday / or how to wrap chips / or where the street is
Jo Eades was selected to be part of Apple and Snakes Future Voices project in 2023. She won both the Bristol Lyra Poetry Festival Grand Slam and the Hip Yak Poetry Shack Slam at WOMAD Festival in 2024. @joeadespoet
Caroline Maldonado
Wax doll From a surfeit of dark you’re wax-cold at the basement window while through the back of the house light filters down the corridor and beyond there’s the garden with banana and bougainvillea and a child under the palm leaves holding out a...
Vankshita Mishra
eden does my world scatter and sprout possibilities every time I take a step? I choose a sapling – it flourishes and flowers, pollinates and I pluck we tumble through the cycles selecting seed after seed I’m trapped in the circle leading from...
David Van-Cauter
Tip In the evening light at the freezing tip we lug bin bags from the blanket of the car in masked anonymity through tired hi-viz employees, mumbling advice to pallid human figures, barely there, excising months of lockdown trash. I find a working...
Sarah Harrison Reid
blackhouse when I squat down by a stone wall the moment enters windless broken arms around me naked to the sky filled with a hearth of tree a machair rug when I lose all sense of others as far as the sea and then some slip down a funnel become...
Sarah James
Floundering March 1897, a rough winter turns rougher. A mast-gnashing southwesterly disrupts the balance between sea and air. The horizon swirls, then vanishes. Gale-force surges churn up 30ft waves, haul chaos in their wake. Surf froths like the...
Marc Woodward
Wild Rufus after Elmore James ‘The Sky is Crying’ Wild Rufus played sax in the Duke of York jamming with Deano in the old tap room. Mostly twelve bars: Muddy Waters, Son House, Elmore James – I believe I’ll dust my broom. I snuck in late with my...
Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa
Bone & Breathless skin is missing liberation & violation usually ends de same way with your DNA lying on someone’s grass in 2005 de soil asked de sky if it could collect me de sky shunted its back peach & swollen de soil made room for...
Hilary Robinson
Pineapple Upside-Down Cake Sunday. The day I worship at the hob and stove. Unholy music of the kitchen rocks from Spotify, my phone in a Pyrex jug speaker. Sweet Child of Mine. One is out running over the hills, far away from weekend crowds that...
Rachel Davies
Just Because all my life I wanted to meet you and because you were late by three weeks and the cocktail I drank while I waited for you to arrive slid down my throat like orange frogspawn while I gagged over the stainless sink and because when you...