Today’s choice

Previous poems

Charlotte Oliver

 

 

 

Repeat

On a bench outside Next,
a punctured woman
traces circles in the air with
a pale finger
while her thoughts leak out
in a rill of mutterings.
Nobody sees her
in the busy emptiness
of lunchtime. Inside
my pocket

two small shells – they
are chalky, finely ridged.
I feel the edge of their curve
over and over
like a chant.
In the car park
the ticket machine says,
Change is possible.

 

Charlotte Oliver writes for adults and children. A New Northern Poet (2023), she is one of The Poetry Society’s Poets in Schools. Her first full collection My Hands Are Still Just Petals is forthcoming with Valley Press in Oct. 2026.

Magnus McDowall

We rolled out on Seven Sisters Road,
two crates of Tyskie empty in my stairwell.

We were talking from the chest, walking backwards
crackling air above our heads like streetlights

Sarah Boyd

He’s a house of cards, a delicately balanced pyramid
held together by hearing aids and dusty bifocals and
wobbling dentures and ageing pacemaker and
shirt with three buttons missing in action and

Samantha Carr

You became obsessed with nucleated red blood cells when you peeked through an
aperture window at your liquid, viscous nature. You became obsessed with maps

Helen Akers

we’re trying to construct a frame for this
‘highly reactive impulsive emotion’
the nurse is looking into it   

Jenny Robb

By the light of a wolf moon,
my father turns mad.
Anne whispers to a girl in the wind,
and a friend blows into my life.