Today’s choice
Previous poems
On the Twelfth Day of Christmas we bring you Rachel Burns, Lauren Middleton, Hedy Hume
New Year
I start the day early with a cup of tea.
A new diary asks I make an affirmation,
while cleaning my teeth.
I have nothing to offer –
Where did this despair come from?
Yesterday I took my son to Casualty,
for an X-ray on his fractured ankle,
& today I read a poem about the world,
deep broken fractured –
If I was clever enough
I’d turn my son’s fall, a scream
falling from the flagpole, into a metaphor.
I didn’t witness the fall.
Not being there –
The family gathering I couldn’t face
& now this new year.
The fracture clinic calls with an appointment
& my son’s new moon boot
sits & stares at me disapprovingly
from the dark recess of the porch.
Rachel Burns lives in County Durham. She came second in the Disabled Poets Prize 2024 and won the Bylines Sky Hawkins Poetry Competition 2025. Rachel’s first collection is scheduled for publication in 2026 by Broken Sleep Books.
Holding Forgiveness
I held Forgiveness in its infancy:
it grizzled and cried and I couldn’t
get it to settle until I sung softly lullaby
after lullaby. It needed soothing, a gentle
cradle, a safe haven to close its eyes
and rest.
I held Forgiveness all night into the dawn,
until morning tweets took over my tune.
Forgiveness awoke, giggling and gurgling
with a sappy smile until I tried to put her down.
I held Forgiveness for most of the day:
I made space in my arms, let her rest
on my hip. She laid her head over my heart
and listened to its dependable beat –
and I’ll hold Forgiveness into tomorrow
if that is what she needs.
Lauren Middleton (she/her) is a deaf Creative Writing PhD student at Aberystwyth University, Wales. Her research focuses on poetry and mental health. Her most recent poetry publication can be found in Obsessed with Pipework.
Solstice Sonnet
Tired I grew of waiting for the sun
To rise, so I grew a sun of my own.
Weary years passed until my work was done,
And seed bore fruit. I laboured not alone,
For friends there were, who showed me secret ways
To the reagents of my alchemy;
So crept on furtive nights and anxious days
Past the archons of solar majesty,
Who’d lock up every star – as if they could!
Another spark is lit with each lament.
My sun doesn’t burn as I hoped it would,
Not yet – but already there are moments
In the unguarded mirror of my eyes,
When a glimmer gold in the distance lies.
Hedy Hume is a writer of poetry and fiction who haunts the Irish Sea’s stony shores. Her work has been featured in such publications as Inkandescent Press’ MAINSTREAM and Broken Sleep Books’ Metamorphosis. On Instagram they call her @hedy_the_ghost.
Jon Miller
Shadows night blinds the forest tracks pins itself to pine needles antennae frisk its long coat and small foxes learn their trade each leaf sleeps ponds close their one eye woods are busy in their dark diaries as all the shadows unbuckle slip...
Simon Maddrell
There is a paradox of the irresistible that wonders what happens when it meets the immovable. * A man tried to sell a shield & a spear his marketing spiel had such a fatal flaw it triggered a Chinese word for contradiction. * There was a fox...
Zoë Green
The Way North After Paul Flora’s Der Weg nach Norden II The way north is a savage smile that zig-zags the whole length of the page of ice. You pause on the lip of its jaw above dumb unspeakable black. Across the void you dream the flickering...
Helen Ivory on April Fool’s Day
The Fool I am the man you see on a ladder square centre of a field on your morning commute. The rake in my hands clears a patch in the clouds for a clutch of sunflower seeds. Next time you look up from your paper a pother of songbirds have tatted...
Rizwan Akhtar
Demands now a surreal residue lives on your hair you play with in a corridor checking out light fading smiles a verisimilitude of close hands evenings spent on waiting chairs creaked but that decibel silence torn by a stubborn bird outside...
Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
Break-out Session “I’ll stay here with the strawberries,” he said. He still supposed such droll remarks displayed his youthful eccentricity. The fruit in question, surplus to the buffet lunch, was resting, moist and fragrant, in a bowl, alongside...
Chrissy Banks
Birthday after Dorothea Tanning I can hardly believe you are real, come in the night with a present; here, at my door, in a snow-dappled coat, your hair illumined, your eyes small violets. I have doors beyond doors, canvasses propped against every...
Lorraine Carey
Sundays at Grandma’s Gran’s best friend Susan came every, single Sunday. Whippet thin, I often thought she’d disappear into the vacuum of her own cheekbones, she sucked so hard on those fags. Each week we sat through the drag of Sunday Mass, the...
Julie Mullen
Mother’s Day Wrapped in her silks the blue and the dim and the dark, mists of scent, eyes closed against the half-light. Together we walk squares and shades, beneath spires like washed bone. We walk together faded streets hand in hand, we mime....