Today’s choice
Previous poems
Piers Haben
High-Visibility
The precondition for being a ghost is not only death but faith in an afterlife. Kit Fan.
When I lost loved ones last year
I thought my childhood fears would return.
Sleeping in mum’s house waiting
for the seen and felt,
the stupid spoon on the ouija board,
cold coming into a room.
Like when I swept offices, and ran
from the room with dummies in.
But now I find the absence more terrifying.
Oh god, maybe I don’t miss them enough.
Maybe the dead move amongst us
and we hurry through the ghost city,
like commuters, eyes down,
unaware of the cleaners coming home,
the men in high-vis jackets congregating
at the edge of the floodlit road.
Piers Haben is a British poet and recovering economist, currently living on Pico Island, Azores, where his writing explores the intersections of labour and island life, whilst also physically working with stone and soil. Piers was recently shortlisted for the 2025 Wolverhampton WoLF poetry competition.
Ansuya Patel
except this burnt red vase.
Hand shaped in the muffled roar,
devouring flame in the furnace’s mouth.
Hannah Ward
Look, Drew, the
plums are in
pieces beneath
us. I dreamt:
Andrea Small
a flower is not a heron
does not stand on one leg
spear-billed over golden carp
Usha Kishore
At dawn and dusk, my father
becomes a chant, that flies above
the courtyard of the old house
Jane Frank
The leaves are a colour you’ve never seen
but that I will learn to expect
and there’s a fracas-induced full moon
Clara Howell
The way a halved peach breathes, then rots
from the inside out.
Luigi Coppola
Out of ten bars, by the fifth, half of us had flickered
out and by this ninth one, it ended up just him
and me. A matchstick balanced on a stool, he sat
Jon Wesick
Loaded with hawks’ cries and horses’ huffs
Ennio Morricone’s score wails
Paula R. Hilton
When the genie appears, I’m in a frivolous
mood. First request? My mom’s apple pie.