Today’s choice
Previous poems
Hilary Thompson
Hot Cross Buns
Ambling up North Street
on a Saturday afternoon
at the end of a long Winter,
I am stopped by two women,
elderly, smiling eyes and mouths,
lip-sticked, offering an open pack
of hot cross buns from the NISA shop
down the road. The shorter of the two
with red hair folded back behind her head
says: would you like a hot cross bun, dear?
I look, smile back at the kind offer and say:
thank you but I’m gluten free.
She looks me straight in the eye, holds me there
for a long moment and says: Jesus still loves you, dear.
Thank you, I say, still smiling.
Hilary Thompson writes poetry as an everyday occupation.
Gareth Writer-Davies
The Cutters It's the clatter I hear first of metal tooth biting down scything sharp through the wildings. The most stupid way to die is flaying by hedge cutter. So I wave my arms and jump and the two farmboys with grins like soldiers pause the grinders...
Lucy Dixcart
I Claim This Sky All winter I have kept vigil on these lichen-licked branches, compacting myself like stone. I’ve laid out the bones of my dead, glued my bloodied edges back together, shredded my pages and fed them to the wind – a lost language...
Jared Sagar
Watching the Dead It’s how you remember him most. Under the lampshade with no sound, cobalt slip-ons angled by the chair, hands white as plugs (he’d always question the purpose of winter). It’s how you remember him most. Paints in a fossil box...
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...