Today’s choice
Previous poems
Sue Wallace-Shaddad
Tabula Rasa
Rectangular, with corners cut off like an octagon, muddy brown shows through the cream exterior where the edges are chipped. Just the right height for a young child learning to stand. Coloured beakers stacked up ready to be knocked down. A place for card games played at speed, endless cups of tea. Smooth and squat, immovable, it has borne the weight of decades, silent witness to family life, a slab too heavy to lift up.
Sue Wallace-Shaddad’s pamphlets are: Once There Was Colour, (Palewell Press, 2024), Sleeping Under Clouds (Clayhanger Press, 2023), A City Waking Up (Dempsey and Windle, 2020). Widely published, Sue does readings, writes poetry reviews and runs workshops suewallaceshaddad.wordpress.com
Sam J Grudgings
The birds are spies, they report to the trees The birds don’t grant the day without sacrifice. We feed them gold bullion in place of corn. We are starving. We gift them an audience to our momentary. Tomorrow has gone, so we offer air burials as...
Ilse Pedler
Jed of the Dodgems My brother said you can’t make a mountain out of a sow’s arse and at sixteen he ran away to join the fair; changed his name from Gordon to Jed of the Dodgems, grew his hair, slicked it back with Brylcreem perfected the art of...
Melanie Branton
my brilliant boyfriend told me you’re not very intelligent, you only got good grades because you’re a conformist that’s the text we had to learn, boys are vowels girls are consonants, boundaries, sheepdogs, only there to hold the vowels together,...
Kenneth Pobo
Mrs. Panterluck says she doesn’t know why she keeps dis- appearing. One minute she’s in a mall walking over to a perfume kiosk and the next she’s gone. It’s like she misplaces her skin. Wherever she is, she retains a brain, though Mr....
Ruth Aylett
Graphic Designs He arrives in a pixellated taxi so low-res he could be any of the men who’d tried to resize her round the axis of their doubts. Her fractal word within a word within a word, too small for her own resolution, plinks into the glass...
Caleb Parkin
Queertopia (Working Title) i dreamt it once but i dream a lot of things not all of them printable but this was some kind of culty shit well no the good bits of a cult if you can say cults have redeeming features i...
Philip Dunkerley
Good Neighbour Irecê, Brazil An entrepreneur, he ran a butcher’s stall in the market. So you could see the meat he’d waft the flies away with his hand. We rented a house from him; he showed us the covered tank in the yard - that’s where the truck...
Steve Griffiths
Your artificial light gave out Your garden has no security, just the electronic sensor that whispers in husky unpredictable clicks that accompany the moths feeding in the darkness. To your mind, to my mind the world of the moths will be...
David Punter
Neighbourhood News Hi, I’m Bill. I’ve just moved in to that little house on New Street (you know the one, it’s been covered in graffiti for God knows how long). I’ve got six dogs and a dead rabbit which I keep in the fridge as well as lots of...