Today’s choice
Previous poems
Aardhra Chandran
Chavittu Nadakam
Canvas boots, pig-iron tacks.
At midnight, the wooden platform groans like a hull.
The raw earth shakes below the planks,
cardboard stage-sets buckling under the stride.
The Emperor wears a crown of tinsel,
his beard fixed with stinking spirit-gum.
The heel-strike splinters the cedar wood,
bruising the shin beneath the leather.
A low thrumming runs through timber long after the crowd leaves.
Cedar grain stamped into skin.
Aardhra Chandran is a poet from Kerala, India. Her work has appeared in Eunoia Review, Active Muse, The Punch Magazine, and Borderless Journal, and is forthcoming in other literary journals. Her poetry engages with material landscapes, labour, memory, and the ecological textures of place.
Julian Dobson
You too I guess
have studied the surviving starlings
as they swoop and whistle
by the snack trailer at Moorfoot
Mark Czanik
I loved the tales Luke told me of starving writers,
and the sacrifices they made following their hearts.
Philip K Dick eating dog food. Bukowski’s candy bars.
Nigel King
My compass – its needle set with a sliver of blue stone – spins and spins. Breath mists my snow
goggles. I wipe them endlessly. Even in these thick seal-skin mitts my hands are frozen. I have been
no place as still as this.
Clare Bryden
seek justice
and you hold
a seashell to your ear
hear
Gail Webb
He cuts. I lie still, teach myself
to dream of St David’s Bay,
seaweed strewn on incoming tides,
surfers slice big waves in half.
Kim Cullen
I pull a dress over my head
calm foggy blue linen
sleeved in lavender,
press frizzed hair
Mark G. Pennington
Vigo in Autumn is still a furnace
the nightjars
roost on ram-tarmacked roads
and hot guapas carrying fish baskets
Ivan McGuinness
Begins
in a bubble
strained by chalk.
Where the brim-full hill cries,
weeping tracks merge
Elizabeth Wilson Davies
There are places in Wales I don’t go: reservoirs that are the subconscious of a people – R S Thomas
Cofiwch Dryweryn, that two-word protest,
white on blood-red background, landscaped in green,