Today’s choice
Previous poems
Gill Horitz
Cyclamen
I woke to workers with blades
along the verge, yellow-jacketed
to signify contracted rights
to hack and scythe died-back
bracken and living saplings
to a brown shrivel.
What a story to be part of,
forlorn in the telling
of nature diminished
by men being masterful.
But remember their look
before the blades,
petals of quiet white
circle a deeper plot.
Zoë Sîobhan Howarth-Lowe
Sea Bed I cannot sleep. Tonight, the invisible crabs are pinching my nightdress, pouring sand into the folds of the cloth. I can not sleep, they say tonight, there are too many fish in the ocean. They are insisting, clicking and pinching,...
Carol J Forrester
When I Find You In Tesco, Around Half Eleven Tuesday Morning In the canned food section reaching for tinned beans, basket hung from one hand, the other splayed open stretched to the shelf. All of you lifting upwards, feet coming off the acrylic...
Lucy Cage
It’s Not The End I’m Frightened Of But The Unravelling My cat wobbles from mat to bowl to bed, a wonky sashay from which there’s no recovery. She’s past sunlit sprawls, there’s just skulking, sleeping, the disconsolate matting of fur. Anxieties...
Cara L McKee
Sometimes I Radiate Sometimes I radiate, clouds form in my hair and you breathe from me. I am beech and birch, I am oak ash scrubland, I am waking up. Since I’ve been planted here I’ve been keen to remind you that I come from elsewhere. I don’t...
Paul Stephenson
Self-Portrait as Grammar Revision Some of my dogs are rich. I hurry not to buy such expensive cars. The dentist jumps highest and my friends can bark loudly. Today I feel like toothache. For my birthday I would like that tree. I shall come to your...
Karan Chambers
Stripping the Carcass Stripping meat from the leftover chicken turns my stomach – separating sagging skin from gristle; detaching spinal column from shrivelled vertebrae and bleach-white bone. But I was taught by my mother not to be wasteful, as...
Steve Perfect
Two close voices 1 If I remember when the full moon rose while sunlight still warmed the evening’s outline from below I don’t picture you in the scene but understand that you were everywhere each closing bud each bird settling to roost each...
Salil Chaturvedi
Parched sparrow Does it ever happen to you? A sparrow appears in your dreams Beak open, mouth parched Waterless desperation in its eyes Night after night of a parched sparrow You wake up one morning with nothing on your mind except the memory of some dry...
Jacob Mckibbin
Noticeable The greatest quality of the only person who has ever noticed me is that they think that I’m noticeable. In school everything that made me noticeable made me a target: the birthmark on my face that everyone in my class gave a different...