Today’s choice
Previous poems
Tom Kelly
Save Me
At thirteen I am competing with James Joyce,
encouraging pain, at the very least discomfort.
See me fervently praying,
waiting to receive the Communion host.
My knees more than ache, then burn,
I bless the wooden pew causing this necessary pain and
believe implicitly Christ will save me.
Tom Kelly’s most recent collection Walking My Streets is the thirteenth published by Red Squirrel Press and explores Kelly’s life and changing face of his native north-east of England.
Jim Murdoch
Weeds Needs must and so they do. Without hesitation or regret. Maslow at least got that right. Love is not a need per se. The need for love (real or imagined) is the need. Like hunger or thirst. Flowers are beautiful. Most flowers. Weeds...
Elisabeth Sennitt Clough
paradise farm don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining the for sale by auction sign says paradise farm but i know this is the yard of the house i grew up in i’m an adult tourist in my fen-poor childhood where the past crunches beneath me like...
Freyja Jones
Every time the doctor sighs looks me in the face, a faint smile playing around his lips eyes sketching scars into my cheeks as if I am nothing more than a shrunken pea another idiotic woman a googler a giver-upper a hypochondriac who loves the...
Erica Hesketh
Placenta in the beginning spiral arteries unwound a river thundered to the site where the capsule was buried, flesh into flesh, bathing the villi in blood: our first exchange within days a structure sprang up along the outermost wall, a trading...
Hannah Welfare
Firstborn My hands Are bird wings Against the soft percussion Of his heartbeat A caesarean scar Cradles my pelvis Beneath my sexless breasts Each new day Paints his vision His hand curls towards A glove A book made of rags A spoon carved from bone...
On the Twelfth Day of Christmas, we bring you Elle Dillion-Reams, Nu Dawn and My Hairy Vag
Christmas Poem Worries of the year wrapped up In non recyclable plastic paper Black Friday Sale hall of unmissable deals Our care for one another must be revealed in how we BUY for one another Spend Spend Spend We tend to the sealed boxes bright Hang The...
On the Eleventh Day of Christmas, we bring you Kathryn Alderman, Joanne Key, Fiona Larkin
New Year 2022 Lips kissed at midnight, we skitter home, twist off rimy pavements like kittens on black ice, think how returning takes forever. We try to squint at the twelvemonth ahead but our eyeballs are bobbed plums, rollicking spirit-levels...
On the Tenth Day of Christmas, we bring you Sue Burge, Marie-Louise Eyres, Sue Finch
Clara is just another girl, dreaming in her deep pink world of sugar mice and sugar plums. Young enough to fall for the charms of clockwork and blue-eyed dolls with ballerina sherbet swirls of layered net; light enough to sit on uncles’ laps,...
On the Ninth Day of Christmas, we bring you Adam Warne, Ken Evans, Marcelle Newbold
Nativity ‘Lullay, lullay.’ Can you hear her sing, so far from here, crouched on bloodied straw, beside the phlegmatic ox? ‘Lullay, lullay, my little child, may we know peace tonight.’ She sings, and learns, against her weary heart, the peace he...