Today’s choice
Previous poems
Clive Donovan
Three Winds
I go to the top of the risen hill,
above the trees, beyond the grass,
where only hard ground lives
—and three winds mingle, whispering,
all merging in a jostle.
They use my body frame to make sound
and, listening, I hear, as they tell
where they’ve been and where they go:
You, man, with a gravestone in your heart,
let us shake your woes away
and they do, they really do,
they rattle my teeth with generosity.
I retreat,
my cold hands in empty pockets,
full of the wisdom of the great silence.
Clive Donovan has three poetry collections, The Taste of Glass [Cinnamon Press 2021], Wound Up With Love [Lapwing 2022] and Movement of People [Dempsey&Windle 2024] and is published in a wide variety of magazines including Acumen, Crannog, Ink Sweat & Tears, Prole and Stand.
Ilse Pedler
Jed of the Dodgems My brother said you can’t make a mountain out of a sow’s arse and at sixteen he ran away to join the fair; changed his name from Gordon to Jed of the Dodgems, grew his hair, slicked it back with Brylcreem perfected the art of...
Melanie Branton
my brilliant boyfriend told me you’re not very intelligent, you only got good grades because you’re a conformist that’s the text we had to learn, boys are vowels girls are consonants, boundaries, sheepdogs, only there to hold the vowels together,...
Kenneth Pobo
Mrs. Panterluck says she doesn’t know why she keeps dis- appearing. One minute she’s in a mall walking over to a perfume kiosk and the next she’s gone. It’s like she misplaces her skin. Wherever she is, she retains a brain, though Mr....
Ruth Aylett
Graphic Designs He arrives in a pixellated taxi so low-res he could be any of the men who’d tried to resize her round the axis of their doubts. Her fractal word within a word within a word, too small for her own resolution, plinks into the glass...
Caleb Parkin
Queertopia (Working Title) i dreamt it once but i dream a lot of things not all of them printable but this was some kind of culty shit well no the good bits of a cult if you can say cults have redeeming features i...
Philip Dunkerley
Good Neighbour Irecê, Brazil An entrepreneur, he ran a butcher’s stall in the market. So you could see the meat he’d waft the flies away with his hand. We rented a house from him; he showed us the covered tank in the yard - that’s where the truck...
Steve Griffiths
Your artificial light gave out Your garden has no security, just the electronic sensor that whispers in husky unpredictable clicks that accompany the moths feeding in the darkness. To your mind, to my mind the world of the moths will be...
David Punter
Neighbourhood News Hi, I’m Bill. I’ve just moved in to that little house on New Street (you know the one, it’s been covered in graffiti for God knows how long). I’ve got six dogs and a dead rabbit which I keep in the fridge as well as lots of...
Gurpreet Bharya
Imagining myself as a bitter, old woman Here I am as old as you said I would grow altogether alone drinking tea curled up with a gossip of stars and the milky thaw of the moon – the thrum of the air still thrums in me as the flowers fold in...