Today’s choice
Previous poems
John Doyle
Wah-Wah Pedal Poem
I hide a knife amongst a bush longing to burn,
days like these are plots from a heathen’s bible.
Broken glass, making noise on the skeleton-throne night
becomes heartless stone, guilty as mathematics bleeding poetry from the gums of my street.
I pick up my phone – wrong number :
She wants to speak to Mike, half-brother of a man
last seen hijacking a small cargo plane
bound for Santiago. I told her Mike’s dead. I gave the receiver back to its taker.
His full brother’s the one I want,
I’ll do anything to find him, wring a plot for my poem
from a serpent
shimmering in his throat
John Doyle is from County Kildare in Ireland, and now lives in Dublin with his wife and their two dogs. He’s had 10 poetry collections published since 2017, and works as a librarian.
Sarah Davies
E47 I like that morning is a verb - everything doing and being, hiving at the tangled docking stations of perhaps- a hypothetical, taglog Tense, like channelling the multitasking buzzibees, North Circular - overloading zero hours, burned-out...
Michael Estabrook
Glass For obvious reasons the first rule in any art gallery or museum is don’t touch the art even if the works seem to be behind glass Is that really glass he asks the guard we’ve never seen that before and we’ve been to the Louvre in Paris and...
Sekhar Banerjee
Goethals Football field, Kurseong I watch a lonesome Tibetan horse grazing on the Goethals football field ; solitary clouds chew sadness all morning here, as if, it is their staple food at breakfast The starving fog licks the whole body of the...
Niall M Oliver
The Unholy Spirit If Jesus was the type to enjoy a drink, then the porcelain version pinned at our front door would surely be happier than he looks Beneath his feet, a round finger bowl, eternally brimming with holy water. Never a dry-dip in this...
Claire Aster
Red wine fruit flies You came for the pear molasses on my kitchen shelf three tummies full of fruity goodness recklessly rolling around in this deep lagoon without any thought of how you might get out. Claire Aster has always been a...
David Belcher
Ask to know your people better When my father goes to Edinburgh, the hilly streets and crowds of tourists make him grouchy. This is his mother’s country. She is not there, he cannot touch the things she touched but he sees and hears what made the...
Robert Hirschfield
Cheating At Cards She slaps down her three shadows on the table and runs off with my shadow. Robert Hirschfield's poems have appeared in Salamander, Grasslimb, Noon (Japan), The Moth (Ireland), Pamplemousse and other magazines. More...
Sophie Herxheimer and Rishi Dastidar
Join us for a live zoom reading from Sophie Herxheimer and Rishi Dastidar with Support from Kevin Reid in our new occasional 'Live from the Butchery' series, hosted by Helen Ivory and Martin Figura from their home. The reading will take place on Sunday...
Ilhem Issaoui
My unromantic poem for this unromantic time as the world is asleep like a spiral shell or like the maddening stairs It takes time and effort to unfurl It happens naturally though, for most, Through nature's imperative Once we are old, though, we...