Today’s choice
Previous poems
Roger Robinson
Pipeline
We walk from cane fields,
cotton in our nightshirts, sweet
sugar on our teeth.
My peoples chant strong magic.
My peoples beatbox in jail.
Roger Robinson won the T.S. Eliot Prize (2019), the RSL Ondaatje Prize (2020), the Cholmondeley Award (2024). He is a Royal Society of Literature Fellow and has been shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, the OCM Bocas Poetry Prize, the Oxford Brookes Poetry Prize, and the European Prize for Freedom.
His collection A Portable Paradise was named a New Statesman Book of the Year. His book Home Is Not a Place, created in collaboration with Johny Pitts, was a Guardian Poetry Book of the Year and shortlisted for the British Book Awards. Insta: @rogerrobinsononline Website: rogerrobinsononline.com
Matthew F. Amati
Hands said to Head
look what you’ve made me do
it’s not me, Head said, talk to
Heart, that guy’s sick
Mariam Saidan
‘Female singing constitutes a ‘forbidden act’ (ḥarām),
punishable under Article 638 of the Islamic Penal Code.’
Meg Pokrass
This is what happens when she sits alone in her dining room, eating smoked trout and canned sardines.
Chen-ou Liu
this fresh morning
so much like the others …
yet starlings shape-shift
Jim Paterson
A Tuesday morning in November
out on the street taking in the bins.
As a flight of crows flashed past
the street lights went out.
Andy Humphrey
Noises are louder now: the kesh
of tyres on tarmac slicked
with leaves. Rain’s drumming thunder.
Chrissie Gittins
When you’ve used one handle to open the door,
use the other handle to close it.
Morgan Harlow
She hadn’t lost a child but if she had she imagined it would be like that.
Antony Owen and Martin Figura on Remembrance Day
Let fathers bind their sons
to altars, so the wind
might winnow the chaff.