Today’s choice
Previous poems
Alice O’Malley-Woods
For the Peregrines of Offham Chalk Pit
The quarry holds your eyrie like a grateful palm.
You – indelicate gobber
all gape and gum-pink
circled in the beach white
like a mouth stuck in wonder. O
spit-shrieker
coming back for yourself,
tearing fur so diligently,
never rushing the thistle of this nest
to be before it’s ready.
World is all precipice
and feather is nothing but needle.
I know it –
the need not to be seen
unblended in stark-light.
How it is the air not the earth
that scares us
by making us
so apparent.
You will wrestle yourself out –
body forth in sharp clatter.
Straight as a pine.
Clean as a punch.
Coming for the ground
with both eyes fixed.
Coming in sleet,
to churn the turf
to thunder.
May they never see you coming.
Survival is just a well placed fall
that nobody can outrun.
Alice O‘Malley-Woods is a poet and researcher based in Lewes, East Sussex. Her work explores themes of loss, ecogrief, and disability. She is the winner of the Black Cat Nature Writing Prize, 2024, and first runner up in the NAWG poetry prize 2016. She is currently completing a PhD in neuroqueer ecopoetics at Brighton University.
Miles Salter
Crisps with Robin Hood I almost missed him, with those camouflage trousers on. He was, naturally, in the woods. I had shorts. ‘Are you Robin Hood?’ I asked. He stared for a spell, then nodded. ‘Where’s Merlin?’ I said. ‘And Little Elton?’ He...
Lucy Atkinson
Sunspot I watched her. Persephone. Sunflowers on her dungarees. Breathing in the blackened syrup. London air. She’s trying not to talk about it but she remembers. Winter. There’s Parsley on the windowsill. Planted in a little mug. The only spot in...
Stanley Wilkin
Appearance and Apparition He pirouetted into the room, the lonely dancer With moon-blown hair. Along the way he brushed the sea Gathering it up like dust. Each morning seated on my porch I welcomed his unseen arrival A coffee in one hand a smile...
Rachel Coventry
Clematis My mother loved wild things like clematis, she had respect for anything that disregarded perimeters, to hell with the neighbours and their territorial claims. Maybe that’s more me than her. Oh, you’re a brat she’d say like clematis; an...
John Grey
To a Father I Never Knew Go on, be mostly unexamined. Excuse yourself from history. Hang there on the periphery of consciousness. If you’re okay with that, then fine. But I rate you more important than you do yourself. And I’ll legitimize you...
Lydia Allison
Not Anywhere We did not rollerblade. We did not keep secrets. He was not still in love. I did not bring my telescope and did not know the names of stars. He did not pretend to like the sound of my book. We did not order these. The bones did not...
Sunyi Dean
Dust I have become my mother, always sweeping through the corners of our corners, her broom in search of imperfection to eviscerate. Life is so untidy, but she has found ways to be neat. She picks up all the scattered things left lying,...
Sam Hickford
Familiar Tissue "My father is given to me and I dissect his body. I study him carefully. You ask me where I learn anatomy?" - Stanislaw Szukalski As every sinew, tendon, lies apart I reflect that only, in these loving scrapes will he be at all...
Jenny Moroney
Part We didn't expect it to snow but look it falls in soft flakes. Alone now, we leave the cottage between white folds and aim at mountains. You walk ahead: a gap, I leave and over your footprints, I press my own. We follow the stream winter has...