Today’s choice
Previous poems
Bel Wallace
My dad is thinking geometrically,
eyes closed; he waves his arms
to describe how he can transform
a circle into a square.
Did you know
a line has only one dimension?
That means it takes up no space.
Perhaps trigonometry can save us.
You need two fixed points for triangulation.
We have none.
There’s a square, he says, which needs
to be a circle.
And then he speaks of a continuous plane
perforated by endless stars
Bel Wallace practises yoga and likes very long walks. It was on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela that she found a story which wanted to be told. She’s still working on that, but poetry was her first love and plenty of other stories and poems have emerged along the way.
Helen Grant
Oranges On a dark Friday, in the early night I walked past an orange on the pavement by a parked ambulance, in a setback carpark, under faltering streetlights and hefty air. No stars were shining but this orange seemed to do so, and for a fleeting moment...
Rob A. Mackenzie
Workshop for Shy Self-Promoters Although I have never been on the pushy side of unassertive, what precedent in tactical avoidance I’ve established for shy self-promoters!: a workshop on low-visibility preening in Ray Bans and balaclavas by Inspirational...
William Stephenson
The Human Market Animals gather beneath a plasma screen in the square: a colony of lemurs with calculators in their paws, lizards with phones that twitter and purr. How did you get here, naked, bruised, unshaven? An owl scratches numbers into your...
Claire Walker
Emily Little love, I see your face, so like your grandfather’s. There is the obvious - his July-lion’s mane tamed to your September copper. But me in the middle, part him, part you, I was always too distracted by laundry, homework, things that keep a...
John Greening
1901: The Interpretation of Owls (Four owls on a branch, and one on its own, all smoking long churchwarden clay pipes, and listening to the music of a songbird in front of a giant moon – like five patients waiting for wise Dr Freud.) The First...
Carolyn Oulton
Vaccination Day At the surgery my mother doesn’t want to wait in the car, keeps opening the door. It’s deadly out there, and all I can think is she’s going to say Yoohoo! It’s Mrs … yoohoo! No one is actually warm enough. Mr Poole never does turn...
Carla Scarano D’Antonio
A safe den When my girlfriends come we delineate our territories. I build a fence with a cradle, two chairs and a stool, a cut-out space that protects and defines against trespassing. Knitted blankets cover my baby dolls, rags are my curtains. I arrange...
Nora Blascsok
Something Boy, I see you, turn up day after day, crouch by the pond, assortment of snacks, hold out a hand or stand still as air. Trackies, oversized tee, slowly scattering feed, pigeons land on shoulders that carry the world, there’s room for a thing...
Lucia Sellars
moment Once upon a teacup, I woke up. The eyelids yawned and reality percolated down. This is not how rain starts, this is not how the world keeps on its axis. I had a hat to cover my sinful thoughts, and a mouth, to zip them in. My hands...