Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jena Woodhouse
Granules in the Hourglass
Syllables cascade through time,
granules in an hourglass,
to recombine, cohere into
a word, a phrase, poetic line.
Language reinvents itself,
coruscates in signs on walls;
falls silent, mute as clay and stone
on tablets that enshrine its form.
We think we make our language sing:
our mother tongue gave us the song;
we, too, are particles of time,
free-falling; crucibles of mind.
Jena Woodhouse‘s unpublished poetry collection, Tidings from the Pelagos: a Polyphony was shortlisted in the Greek-based Eyelands International Book Awards 2024. Her forthcoming collection is The Singing Ship: a Study in Resistances, to be published by Calanthe Press, November 2025. She lived and worked for a decade in Greece, and has spent time in many other countries of Eastern and Western Europe.
Eleanor Punter
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Julia Stothard
Our House Where our house should have been there was a hedge obscuring all but the roof from street view where our chimney pot should have been there was a cap to prevent the birds falling in and our souls from escaping where our front door should...
Simon Williams
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Grant Tarbard
Coda The Old Testament There will be a dog, a great stowaway on the dazzle of a Celt’s smokers cough. All spasm and splint, a mollusc of sawn-off sticklebacks for a brambly tongue, licking bad days off the calendar. Dog, a corpse wax witness of...
Susannah Violette
Don´t Let Me Sleep I already had visions laced with these encounters; bitumen coffee, sweet-cake pink. Your body spread before me, Oh god! Your long fingers. Let me offer you my still wet hand A slip of love, another creature dying. Tell me I...
Jennifer A. McGowan
Wager I need coins. Not for my eyes but a wager, a circle of risky bets. Emptying my purse, I find a handful of silver, drum it on the table. And then I dig in, find actual shrapnel. Wounds become currency. Silent mouths gape punctuation. The...
Glen Armstrong
Antonyms for “Late-Stage Capitalism” I make noises with my mouth, some of which are words. I hold a receipt between my teeth while I take off my gloves and fumble with a keychain. Most of the stuff in my pockets belongs to something that no longer...
Regina Weinert
Episodes a moth has swiped a thought right in front of my face a flicker and gone pure cheek the wing brush lingering my eyes scan the walls for pulsing fool’s silver smudges on the ceiling the ghost of a white shoulder bumblebees prey on me...
Peter Daniels
Dormouse Summer When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation), sleep, eating and swilling, buttoning and unbuttoning – how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse. Byron, Journal 7 December 1813 Missing the small...