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.
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...
Philip Dunkerley
Flying Away I sit watching the green line on the screen, your flight moving relentlessly onwards, away from me. Everything feels hollow. So many people here didn’t want you to go. What have we done to the world, how did we shrink it to allow us to...
Paul Connolly
Winter Thorn Before the bend he remembers what he usually sees at the bend even in mist-less and anemic days the thorn’s bespoke glow, a hazed corona of frozen smoke its branchlets weave and hold working the air with web, a murk his rallentando steps of...
Owen Gallagher
The Neglected Partner Love the way your bones keep you upright. your skin a raincoat. Don’t neglect the beauty of all those organs working ceaselessly. Let your body and mind flirt, have a constant honeymoon, swear vows regularly. Praise the...
Dick Jones
In the Days Before they Came What interests me so much more than those pages of scripture foxed with turning is his choosing of a blue gown over a white; his weighing of two stones in either hand, the one mottled like a perfect moon, the other...
Colin Bancroft
Looking out on the Menai Strait The viewpoint is deserted. The sky a pastel chart. Beneath the bridge the Swillies gargle, Fish traps bob like U-boats. The glaciers are gone but the air is deathly still. Text messages haunt like Ouija. This age has...
Scarlett Ward Bennett
Space Two astronauts take off into space and not a single person notices the earth contract as they do so. They are birthed free from terra firma and propel themselves into orbit and perhaps mother nature is too tired to strain now so the umbilicus is...
Ella Sadie Guthrie
Heartbreaker We are all just works in progress, muscles aching and eczema breaking skin Our minds playing tricks on us from Our last relationships. I confided this in the pub and you called me a heartbreaker, helping me eat yellow cheese off cold chips....
Steve Xerri
The Year in Thirteen Moons i gardener's forgotten fork a pronged Excalibur locked in iron ground, round pond a mirror to the ice moon ii pollen-yellow catkin moon, a token of death loosening its grip : frost gone, sap on the move iii mass of gelatinous...