Today’s choice
Previous poems
Ansuya Patel
I Cast Out Everything
except this burnt red vase.
Hand shaped in the muffled roar,
devouring flame in the furnace’s mouth.
Sand becomes skin of light.
Its glass body trembles like a sea
animal remembering its salt.
I hold the lagoon’s sigh,
gondolas murmur, emerald waters
flowing along Venetian blue
like mistresses of fire. Its
slender nape of earth
burned to water,
air captured in crystal.
Everything dissolves —
paper, promise, footprint.
But this vase remembers how
light once learned to stand
still.
Ansuya was a joint winner of Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize in 2024. Her debut collection is out with Indigo Dreams Publishing. Her poems have been shortlisted for Bridport, Alpine, Aurora, highly commended at Erbacce. Appeared in Allegro, Artemesia, BlackinWhite, Crowstep, Drawn to the Light, Gypsophila, Ink Sweat and Tears, Rattle and Renard. She can be found on Instagram @ansuya_a_ and online at https://
John Doyle
I hide a knife amongst a bush longing to burn,
days like these are plots from a heathen’s bible.
William Coniston
My second cousin twice removed arrived in May
at her old nest in the eaves of the ruined barn.
Simon Williams
A white cloak that folds like a shopping bag,
like a Pac-a-mac with pagan overtones,
much larger when unfolded than a pocket,
a TARDIS of a cloak.
Emma Page
I grow shoots, acid green;
climb the walls,
surprise myself.
Mary McQueen
It’s starts in utero, painted wood carvings thick as a
finger, gift
wrapped in nostalgia.
Alan Hardy
Made a list.
A record.
The dishes she ate.
Monuments visited.
In Paris.
Susana Arrieta
Tempting death with every cobblestoned step
his face was a collection of broken records
Peter Leight
There’s more waste than we use for the things we ordinarily use waste for, such as piling it on barges and sending them out to sea, tucking it under the surface like a layer of insulation . . .
John Grey
there are some lives
lived poolside
and others that
mostly consist of
a bent back in a field –