Today’s choice
Previous poems
Francis de Lima
Portrait
Oh London. U useless city. Map to
nowhere land. Tight stretch
open eye. The underground metal.
The night tube. The railway. Smog
Over coaltrip. The presence
Of machine upon machine. U
behemoth. Sea urchin. Fricative city.
And yet. Nightlamp burning into
the chippy down and out. Art in
the stuck gum on the Millenium.
And Wren
turned St Pauls upside down to count
a broken weightline
distance into the future. Momentum scream.
A liars’ cant. Tragedy at play. But so vast
Life in the kingdom. Test tube. Raucous.
Speakers in the round. Wringing poems.
Irish epiphany. Cream of glass.
Capable of cracking. Capable.
Brittle plant. Chewing.
Something growing. On Primrose
Hill.
The heath. Episodes and vignettes.
Untouchable happiness. Insulated time.
Francis de Lima is a Finnish-Brazilian poet living in London, where they recently completed their MA in Poetic Practice at Royal Holloway. Many of their poems can be found in literature magazines and some have even been nominated for an award or two.
Tim Brookes
In the charity shop I try on a coat
flocked with fake shearling,
shaved-soft almost: fibres
fired onto plastic to fool the wrist.
Kim Waters
You’re a character, a Roman numeral,
an internet meme. Descendant
from a peasant’s crook or cattle prod,
you’re the twelfth letter of the alphabet,
Sylvie Jane Lewis
Being quiet and easily tired by being alive among people, I take
the cowardly route to community. I curate a digital garden of oddity.
At best my phone is a menagerie of queers: trinket makers, amateur
playwrights, witches, and, over and over again, my own personal monarchy.
Maryam Alsaeid
Maybe after your bath—
you will sit for a moment,
the towel will hold you close
like a quiet prayer—
Steve Komarnyckyj, Anna Bowles and Lynnda Wardle for Holocaust Memorial Day
where I saw you praying through the angle of the door
Now hangs only in my mind I breathe on its glass wipe away fly specks
Annie Wright
Sing silver times, shimmering columns
of light on the wine-dark, temple
to moon-eyed Hecate, the insatiable.
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
Yucheng Tao
But look here, I turned my head
and discovered the Denver Museum
waiting,
nerve, a soft-boned
species hums
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