Today’s choice
Previous poems
On the eighth day of Christmas, we bring you Em Gray, Abigail Ottley and Emma Simon
Weird
Thank you for the knickers
but I think I prefer the ones that cover my tummy
and how the elastic feels round my waist.
I started last summer.
I was wearing my white indoor jeans
and feeling kind of both tired and sparky
so I lay on my bed and pedalled my legs
and Eddie went all quiet and said I should go to the loo
which was an odd thing for a brother to tell a sister.
When I opened your present I felt a bit weird
and thought everyone was thinking of me in the knickers
with Ho Ho Ho across my bum
so I twisted them to hide the red words
and wore them like a halo.
Em Gray is a neurodivergent poet living in Brighton, UK. She has been highly commended by the Forward Prize, shortlisted for the Creative Future Writers’ Award and won second prize in the Mslexia Poetry Competition. em-words.bsky.social, insta @em.k.gray.
All I’s
do what work they can
to piece together a world of
small differences
constructing from them a
single truth
promoting one I’s point of view.
Some I’s are made faulty
apt to misinform
innocent of outline and detail
see Christmas trees
glorious with smudges of colour
are saddened by batteries,
wires.
Abigail Ottley writes poetry and short fiction from her home in Penzance in Cornwall. Her debut collection, Out of Eden, will be published by Yaffle’s Nest in May, 2025. instagram.com @abigailottley.bsky.social
The Reindeer
Imagine a hippogriff behind a wire fence
at Chester Zoo and no-one bothering to stop
but hurrying on to the Meerkat Experience,
or smelly llamas. But there you stood, marvelling
as reindeer cropped grass, shook nuzzly antlers,
bellowed air. You were six or so, not fooled by elves,
and, as I discovered years later, assumed it was all
fairytale, bedtime stories. Made-up baby stuff.
And now you’re half a spin of the world away,
somewhere I’ve never been, like Narnia
through the looking glass, where Christmas,
is always sun-screen and surf-dudes, never snow.
Dearheart, don’t ever forget how sometimes
you’ll look up and something or someone astonishing
will step into the ordinary. Remember the reindeer.
They are real. They are real. They are real.
Emma Simon published her first collection Shapeshifting for Beginners last year with Salt Publishing. She has published two pamphlets, The Odds (Smith|Doorstop, 2020) and Dragonish (The Emma Press, 2017). She has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies and has won the Ver Poets, Live Canon, YorkMix and Prole Laureate prizes.
Kathryn O’Driscoll
Finishing Touch God chars the edges of the day, the sky turns the colour of the sediment at the bottom of a bottle of cheap orange squash. I imagine it like tea-staining paper to make replicas of old treasure maps as a kid. I remember burning the...
Anna Kirwin
Once it’s gone, it won’t come back Go to your fields And go to your fen. Go to your tiny Patches of scrub. Breathe the green Whilst it lingers still. Go to your trees And breathe in their bark. Feel the ground undulate Free of concrete. Look to...
Hannah Linden
The Change I wasn’t going to come to the party but you threw bright covers over the noisy magpies who were pecking all the grain – there are still scratch marks on the carpet where they learnt to dance the watusi whilst pretending to be hip. And...
Rebecca Shamash
She Lives Alone She lives in the 6am coffee before the alarm, before school. The light on the water on her skin in the shower, in the way her feet are then young and familiar on the tiles, childlike in their delightful lace of bubbles. She lives...
Isabelle Thompson
Minimalist you play me Philip Glass on video call behind you I see trees in motion stopping and starting as the connection wavers the green fronds repeat the same movement minutely varied and the music builds its slender momentum there is so much...
Chloe Elliott
grey pennant [as taken from Dulux Paint] speaks easy. vomits up love, that pigeon wing cootie catcher. how easy – run of garlic like a spat-out oyster on bruschetta. I snap the necks of all the men in my life and they fizz. fluster out like the...
Rachel Burns
Duplex: Horses after Jericho Brown Horse running wild through post code black spots hooves ringing out through sink bin streets echoing through the ginnel, the red brick streets my last address I saw wild horses my last address, horses, horses,...
Tim Relf
Molehills Moles, my neighbour calls through a hole in the hedge the day we move in – we’ve got moles. I jump up and down on their molehills, he says. Doesn’t do any good, but it makes me feel better. Bin day’s Thursday – black bins this week,...
Gillie Robic
Traffic Your name kicks my arse nearly as far as the roundabout where Jenny and Kim lounge on the grass trying to get a tan. Fate gave them their pasty skin, or their parents did anyway, emoting shut-eyed karaoke in the snug of their local...