Today’s choice
Previous poems
Julia Webb
Essay on Craft
Because a woman woke up
and her head had become a flower.
Because the images were placed
in a way that pleased the eye.
Because if she’s not careful
the scalpel can cut.
Because once a woman is glued down
it’s difficult for her to become unstuck.
Because when a woman steps off the page
a prince might see an opening.
Julia Webb is a a neurodivergent writer and artist from a working class background. She has three collections with Nine Arches Press: Bird Sisters (2016) Threat (2019) and The Telling (2022). She is a poetry editor for Lighthouse – a journal for new writers.
Morag Smith
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Lesley Burt
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Jacques Groen
WHEN an attic becomes garret SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19 and we move away the furthest we can from street life coughs and kisses handshakes, smiles of love, in love and fear makes us shrink...
Kathryn Alderman reviews ‘Hex’ by Jennie Farley
As with her previous collection, My Grandmother Skating (Indigo Dreams), Hex explores ‘the extraordinary with the everyday […] myth, magic and fairy tale’, but goes darker. It quotes Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984) ‘She was feeling...
John Doyle
Besançon : October 1991 Motorways in France stripped to their flesh of cars, of trucks with names of families who run small to medium fruit and veg companies near the Swiss border. France is mine, though - I'm almost sleeping, I know - France is...
Grant Tarbard
A Field Guide of Our Skin This invisible body is a lithe sacrament of flora, bluebell petals reel dizzily from our thick drench of pores, lilac deaths reek in our morning peeling. This ill-lit musculature of fungus is in a state of grace,...
Sally Michaelson
Tzedaka box On Friday nights I slipped a coin through the thin lips of the blue box. It was satisfying to hear it clatter ; I could feed the tin but not myself. Sally Michaelson is a recently retired Conference Interpreter living in...
L Kiew
Today everything is on fire & it’s dangerous the wind claws crimson back & forth running across grass trees catch leaves ember & cinders *** I pray please rain save some green there’s a grasshopper poised for flight at the bottom of...
Cecile Bol
Where you took me I had never cut my fingernails; would only retouch occasional casualties – cracks on thumbs, hooks on index fingers, too long witch-like pinkies. Not once did I sit down with a pair of tiny curved scissors to trim down all ten....