Today’s choice
Previous poems
Hannah Linden
A Philosophy of Light
Formed into darkness
an octopus squeezes around
the spaces of a shipwreck.
Light from the bloodmoon
reddens the water and the octopus
adapts and bleeds. The Earth
hadn’t planned to block the sun.
The moon can’t help how it affects
an octopus or that it seems
a particular way sometimes. Planets
follow their orbits. Moons circle
their planets. An octopus
makes sense of it as best it can,
its heart in all its tentacles,
makes its home wherever it can.
Hannah Linden won the Cafe Writers Poetry Competition 2021, 2nd Leeds Peace Poetry Prize 2024 and other prizes. Her debut pamphlet, The Beautiful Open Sky (V. Press), was shortlisted for the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet 2023. BlueSky: @hannahl1n.bsky.social
Mary Mulholland
Who will pick the apples now she’s gone?
Samantha Carr
She has few secrets with her translucent map skin of blue underground rivers visible to scale.
Alison Patrick
A dozen snail shells exposed on dry soil
in the archangel’s cut brown stalks.
Banded like fairground sweets and helter-skelters . . .
Julie Egdell
At the shore of impossibility
last moments come to nothing
all our plans die in the salt air
of another new day on the black sea.
Elena Chamberlain
My trans friends and I just want to go swimming
in cold water
without a thousand eyes watching.
Regina Weinert
It was the snatch of a dream,
someone said this is not
what you do in the desert,
it was one precise thing, not a list . . .
Philip Dunkerley
We leave early, drive for two and a half hours,
park, find the church where you were married.
Marc Janssen
The sky opens
Blinking its single slackened eye.
Sigune Schnabel tr. Simon Lèbe
She cut letters out of me,
which quietly and unnoticed
danced red poems.