Today’s choice
Previous poems
Charles G. Lauder
Craftsmanship
beneath night’s skin he unearths raw stones
serrated encrusted enigmatic cold
tumbling them in two-twenty grit wears away the dull
four hundred six hundred highlights the delicate
garnet’s exposed seam agate’s brittle dendrites
whilst softest serpentine disintegrates to dust
in quiet solitude he worries
facets of captured moonlight won’t be enough
in the age of electric light blue light
boutiques and diners that never shut
the glow of irrelevance radiates
Charles G. Lauder, Jr, is an American poet who lives in the UK. He’s the author of the collection The Aesthetics of Breath (V.Press, 2019) and three pamphlets, the most recent being Year of the Rat (Blueprint Poetry Press, 2025).
Nina Parmenter
When The Threat of Hell Failed
God created the lanyard,
Bel Wallace
Month by month I felt my muscles harden
these hefty horns grew from my long skull
Stephen Keeler
Something about arriving somewhere new
just as afternoon is leaving . . .
Geraldine Stoneham
The silence and peace of this place
creeps through on birdsong.
Emma Lee
The instruction invites overthinking:
describe your hometown through
the medium of simple sentences
Vanessa Napolitano
I ask my father to dinner, pretending he is still alive,
ask him what he’d like. He says a pork chop which is not
something I know how to cook.
David Forrest
I don’t know why you bother with poetry Vlad mutters as he adjusts the current in the magnets, forcing them to rhyme with each other.
Neil Fulwood
Today’s operative on the ohrwurm shift
has hacked the WiFi password
in the ear canal and now I’m looping back
endlessly to a misheard lyric . . .
Ira Lightman
Laid down, his upraised face is
White – offputting – on a plumped pillow.