Today’s choice
Previous poems
David Van-Cauter
House
…4am and the birdsong begins, a wet January in a new city and I’m alone watching a man in Minnesota, murdered for protecting a woman from a fascist hit squad and the politicians are smirking trying to deny the evidence, saying no it didn’t happen that way, the video is wrong and I’m thinking of you in the crisis house trying to sleep because you said our home was trying to kill you, how it isn’t you, it’s where you are and how the place is a hellhole where the drains are blocked and everything is broken but I don’t see it and you feel sorry for me being blind to all the unresolvable unfixable problems and you keep saying it over and over and you can’t live here you cannot live here it’s all fucked it’s all fucked and I watch the man being killed again by ICE from a different angle after the pepper spray and the beating and he’s saying no, leave her alone and those are his last words as they shoot him ten times and I’m wondering if we’ll ever be the way we were or if this is it now, reality shot down in a hail of bullets as our world accepts that nothing is true any more, that this did not happen and it could not happen here, not here, where we know what is right and who the enemies are, but it’s not you, no, it’s the house, it’s just the house, and if we didn’t live here then everything would no longer be broken, we’d have no home but at least we’d have our lives back and there wouldn’t be all this confusion but you’re not here now and the man lies still again and then he is alive saying no no no and the bullets hit and the man lies and the man lies and the man lies still…
Roy McFarlane
Lampedusa I know this is risky and that I will probably lose the boat, but the shipwrecked on board are exhausted, I will bring them to safety. Video released by Sea-Watch, Guardian For the 43 souls waiting in the port; for lampas the torch,...
Iain Britton
circumference words do not suit do not fit the towns i travel to i’ve this habit of locating new neighbours with different physiognomies * always there are uniforms on the march intractable comic heroes in animal disguises i say very little i...
Charlotte Ansell
Alone at the New Road Hotel He is right to suspect me of infidelity, there will be other rooms, there have been rooms before. At the old textile factory turned hip hotel, in Whitechapel’s tatty bravado, as the brutal heat is sucked from the day...
Marie Papier
A Jar of Honey Would Give the Poem Away instead let’s ponder the idea stay silent let the flowers of the fields come into your vision lavender thyme verbena breathe in their scents let them speak to your senses tease your nostrils ...
Claire Allen
Now She can't remember why she started recording their FaceTime calls. Now, when she's lonely, she scrolls through this small library of conversations and chooses one. It took a whole February weekend to transcribe and learn her lines before...
Anna Chorlton
The Act Summer began with a bike, its frame painted red, one thin wheel. The focus was balance, hours of clinging to walls and doors; fences and fingertips, pigtails and ears. It became about a clown; greasepaint mouth sadways striped dungarees,...
Millie Light
Ballet audition Bent, a teapot, arthritic neck its handle, lips protruding from the spout she’s irked because I fail to retain the enchaînements. She sees a lazy teen – she doesn’t see a girl walking London each night, imagining death more...
Jonathan Kinsman
45rpm heart block is a slowness or abnormality in the heart’s rhythm due to a fault in its electrical conduction system. tread wrong here and the needle jumps — skrt-skrt-skrt. iggy pop plays the songs on christmas day, picks from discs wrinkled...
John Chinaka Onyeche
Portrait of a country What is your country in a definition? When the first ship anchored on the shore of the Atlantic. My country became an experiment of - forced marriage. As with guns, plough and religious wars, they wedded three adults...