Today’s choice

Previous poems

Matt Gilbert

 

 

 

A Rat Decides to Change its Place
 
Disgust springs up from the guts
to meet a sprinting lump
of furry muscle.

Only to be ambushed
by a brilliance of nose, a skittering
perfection of racing claws,

Sleek brown legs, pumping
from the stewed-tea shade
of rain damp oaks

scud towards a pool, below
a crumbled, redbrick efficiency
of Victorian engineering.

Solid body plunging into water,
with the same gratifying, staccato plop
a stone makes, as it hits the target.

 

 

Matt Gilbert is from Bristol, but currently lives in South London. His work has appeared in various publications, including Dust, Ink Sweat & Tears and The Rialto. His debut collection Street Sailing was published by Black Bough Poetry in 2023.

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.