Today’s choice
Previous poems
Kate Bailey
Us and Them
They’ve mended the park fence again,
patched it over with the usual ugly metalwork,
like a riot barricade.
That’ll keep them out –
the delinquents,
the ne’er-do-wells,
who break in and sit on the grass in the dark
and watch the moon,
the dirty buggers!
Next week it will be prised away
to leave a gap the width of a person.
Another incursion.
And those scum-of-the-earth
lying under softly budding trees,
counting the stars.
Kate Bailey is a violinist, but she has always loved words. She has two grown-up daughters, and lives in Oxford with her husband and pacifist cat. Her writing has been published in the Frogmore Papers and the Fish anthology.
Chris Emery
Rooms Inside the sweet and charmless one, the filthy one, the room with flies or night wasps singing far too high. Shutterless and bleached and all-too-ready-rooms, the gassy room, fitted out with pique and sorrow, the one cascading with cries and...
James Appleby
Happening Locally Because the park has hidden the place, the parents of fashionable dogs won’t know. Because the grass has covered up the mud where the knees slid, the couple holding hands won’t know. Because the sirens are quiet, the officers...
Rebecca Gethin
Cep Some years I miss the days of its fruiting or else it doesn’t show: a sign of what’s going on underground how hylae and mycelia are faring. Beneath pines at the woodland edge where a little light comes in its soft egg protrudes meaty and...
Dorothy Baird
Subtraction of Grief Yesterday I slipped into a broken space the wind couldn’t mend. Beside me the reservoir dazzled in the cold sunshine and larch trees losing their copper needles in the fleecing gusts were still, are always, all one in...
Emma Lee
A Pale Fire of Roses It's a child's game: knock on the door and run away. Each time she looked out, she couldn't see who'd knocked. Reporting it felt foolish: it's only a knock on the door. Fourth time and there's a bunch of flowers on the window...
Arji Manuelpillai
True Lies My bro’s so good at dying, he shakes this way and that, dancing in the shrapnel. Mama shouts play nice so we bundle into the sofa bed, bodies clumsily naive. Arnie’s on the telly, a CIA agent, a body of nothing but muscle and man,...
Fizza Abbas
How Inferiority Complex Talks to A Writer Whose Mother Tongue is Urdu I wake up at 7 am, sleep again for two hours, get up at 9 am to finally work, open my laptop, remind myself, no big deal, it's a day, after all, it will pass. Boss sends a...
Fiona Cartwright
The inventor’s wife predicts a storm Each coming storm, I’m alone, love. I take to bed as my blood constricts, is corseted by whalebone. I blot the sky with clouds of my own invention and watch the day run like a shawl’s pulled thread,...
Tristan Moss
The Stack We hold our dead like chairs hold chairs further and further off the floor until one holds no more. Tristan Moss lives in York with his partner and two youngish children. He has recently had poems published in London...