Today’s choice

Previous poems

Craig Dobson

 

 

 

Down the Dank Way
Out of morning
a misted light,
glowing fire
in the air.
Bare trees,
frozen.
A paling sky.
The ground’s
hoary pelt.
Dark river,
whisps
of vapour
on its surface,
like wights
stalking
the remains
of night.
Craig has had poetry, short fiction and drama published in several magazines and is working towards his first collection of poetry.

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...

Hannah Linden

      Sister Death Sits on the Back of the Settee It shouldn’t be such a surprise. She knew me better than most people, after all. So cosy. And yes, in the womb I gobbled her up and thought I’d won. But you forget such things. Behind me like a pantomime...