Today’s choice
Previous poems
Angeliki Ampelogianni
Eating figs on the bathroom floor
on marble tiles bird like
I am a pin measuring drops in the toilet bowl
disembogued into this locked space
with depressions of earth staring at me
the bathroom keeps the history of my enclosures
fake windows chewing up oxygen
closing as I count eggs like shapes
completely deterged of sinful shells
the fig a bit dry as I bury inside it
a stain like flesh from a gleaming branch
I shut the door counting again the days
Angeliki Ampelogianni is a Greek poet and teacher. Her work appear in Harana Poetry, Porridge Magazine, Lucent Dreaming and Poetry London among others. She was the winner of the Oxford Brookes International Poetry competition 2022 in the EAL category.
Jo Bratten
In the shower with Gerard Manley Hopkins Bless me father for I have sinned again Rejoice in soapy foam-fleece fountain furled For I have lied and cursed and fucked with men Flashing quenching sing-shower curtain-curled In hurting self and friend...
Sanjeev Sethi
A Factory of Feelings Your biog is your own, wash it with as many adjectives. Entitlement and empathy are opposites. Dissimulation is elementary to past lovers, like dissemble to ex bosses. Facebook and Twitter are placeboes for amour proper....
Kitty Coles
The moon is a cannibal: she consumes her own body. Flat-footed in her fatness, she sweats and lumbers, ashamed, in the pure of night, of her vast heft. She nibbles her flesh: the taste is oily, repellant, but she swallows it down: the gulps rise...
Lucy Dixcart
Princess Alexandra and the Glass Piano I was a child when I swallowed the piano. My jaw unhinged and down it slid: keys, strings, pins. A dream, I imagined, until a crunch punctuated my footsteps and hammers chinked holes in my thoughts. Rules to...
Steph Morris
Three halves Help yourselves, Alex says, places chocolate on the table, and opens the wrapper, silver wings on all four sides. Three of them, at one end of the table. Charlie cracks a chunk free, one whole end of the bar at a jaunty angle, and...
Janet Rogerson
Ghost I was outside in the square dull of garden when I realised I couldn't draw a ghost. The page waited patiently like the future and my eye held what was supposed to fill it. The narrow path which didn't deserve its name was an appropriate...
UEA Poetry MA Scholars Memoona Zahid and Konstantin Rega
In 2011, IS&T publisher Kate Birch established the The Ink Sweat & Tears Poetry Writing Scholarship (MA) at the University of East Anglia (UEA); Konstantin Nicholas Rega is its ninth recipient. Memoona Zahid is the second student to be awarded The Birch Family...
Lydia Harris
Eliza Traill All her names The hare. A long way from blue. What is the third thing? Twelve snow buntings in a shadow house. What she sees A large stone lintel. A hollow enclosed in a curved wall. Small white bones. A now completed circle. The...
Shelby Stephenson
Meditation on Your Bare Feet In the fruit-apple crimp of glamour and fizzing pressures I found your feet, your painted nails, So Much Fawn, a rose-colored soul, flagrance of motions, though you were miles away; the image of a small rose on the...