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.
Ilhem Issaoui
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Deborah Harvey reviews ‘Two Girls and a Beehive : Poems about the art and lives of Stanley Spencer and Hilda Carline Spencer’ Rosie Jackson and Graham Burchell
I confess to having a personal interest in the art and the life of Stanley Spencer that is entirely fanciful, born of the fact that he and my grandmother, Hilda, both worked in war hospitals in Bristol during the first world war. ‘They could have met,’ I...
Erika Kamlert
Your other name The river, fat and glistening green, slithers through the city through the church yard, covered in windflowers Their petal confetti tore up winter so that spring arrived empty and unwritten with a naked, confessing light Only oval...
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Starlings Dusk, on a winter’s evening, overcast, cold, a stiff offshore wind blowing in from the Irish sea as people emerge from town streets, in twos or threes or solitary, to see this miracle. Small figures muffled to the ears all eyes as the...
Alan Cohen
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Miles Salter
Crisps with Robin Hood I almost missed him, with those camouflage trousers on. He was, naturally, in the woods. I had shorts. ‘Are you Robin Hood?’ I asked. He stared for a spell, then nodded. ‘Where’s Merlin?’ I said. ‘And Little Elton?’ He...
