Today’s choice
Previous poems
Peter Daniels
It Might Never Happen
This is not you, but someone soaked in fake Brut
coming at me in a gesture of fake generosity.
For goodness sake, I only want a quiet life,
it’s no crime not to be a gregarious joiner.
Ultra-polite, ultra-wary, I don’t answer back
but here’s my response to the world in general:
My scowl isn’t personal, it’s just the shape
of my face, and when I smile it’s genuine.
Does not-drinking make me some kind of puritan?
If I could drink gin I’d like it for its whiff of juniper.
I don’t have to take part in their great train robbery
or their tea party trying to be sweet and genteel.
I want you, but I can enjoy Christmas Day on my own
and emerge unsmiling, ready for grey-skied January.
Peter Daniels’ fourth collection is Old Men (Salt, 2024). He has translated Vladislav Khodasévich from Russian, and as queer writer in residence at the London Archives wrote the obscene historical Ballad of Captain Rigby. www.peterdaniels.org.uk
Rebecca Parfitt
In the back of the taxi on my way to the hospital,
thighs clenched together,
the driver asked me,
Samarth Agarwal
Here — in the absolute zero of space — fireworks!
Look how the crucibles of creation,
those million coloured fingers that stretch light years —
Jenny Scoones
We unlearn how it felt to touch
And resume our separate days in shirts and trousers,
Like hazmats against the sun and its longing,
The moon with its underbelly pulls.
Matt Bryden
Now a blanket is spread, offerings
of chutney and shin bones,
a taper held to the fire
that heats the tar beneath our boats.
Kit Duke
I didn’t know then,
moving for a mouth
that refused to yield an inch,
what it wasn’t.
Janet Hatherley
In my cookery exam, we have to prepare a family meal This is summer and Mum can’t put out her trot line with its hooks because of swimmers so I buy three mackerel from the fishmonger. I cycle to the school bus stop one arm on the handlebar,...
Jane Ayres
& my sub-tropical heart
will punctuate the idea of treacling hope
puncturing the sense of a book
Annette Iles
across the street
I am washed off my feet
my heart
splashes up into pieces
Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig
Dusk is dancing & all the visual technologies at hand feel
overwhelmed: mobile eye, pit pastels, graphic card.
It’s down to language, then, imagine.