Today’s choice
Previous poems
Antony Dunn
Plainsong
Have you heard the one about
how I’m hoping to bow out –
playing guitar for the Cure
on a wide stage – the riff pure
as wind-bells in the twilight,
the crowd stretching beyond sight
into the dark and the rain –
smiling, not ageing, not in pain,
lost in the longing song, doubt
done with, drowning myself out?
Antony Dunn has published four collections of poems most recently, Bugs (Carcanet OxfordPoets) and Take This One to Bed (Valley Press). Winner of the Newdigate Prize and an Eric Gregory Award, he edited and introduced Ex Libris, a posthumous collection of poems by David Hughes (Valley Press). Antony is a regular tutor for The Poetry School and has taught many times for Arvon. He has worked on a number of translation projects with poets from Holland, Hungary, Israel and China. He has been Poet in Residence at Ilkley Literature Festival, the University of York and the People Powered Press. Until 2018 he was Artistic Director of the Bridlington Poetry Festival. Antony lives in Leeds. Website: antonydunn.org
Holly Conant
The Slip Hold on tight to my writing hand, darling boy. Who knows how many words I have left. Don’t let me give them all to the page. Holly Conant is a new writer and mature student, currently studying at the University of Leeds. Her poems...
Sidrah Zubair
IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUIRED We have detected a trojan virus! I have developed affinities for dying in peculiar ways such as being choked by the moonlight’s shaking hands or swallowing a cup of live rattlesnake babies Personal and banking information is at...
Jenny Mitchell
Vanishing Mother A jar of Pond’s cold cream glows in amongst her female debris on the dressing table; talc sprinkled with a lipstick smear across a comb. Tissues fluff out of a slit – half-done magic trick beneath a heart-shaped mirror, picturing the...
Caleb Parkin
Ecco the Dolphin Sega Megadrive, 1992 Ecco roves immaculate 16-bit oceans, pierces through jellyfish sparkling their assigned scores. Ecco rotates side on, a perpetual loading icon, flips through scrolling screens of digital habitat. Ecco is neat between...
Antonela Pallini-Zemin
Mix & Match but what if we mixed the smoke of my incense sticks & the smoke of your rolled-up happiness in a room only suitable for two? what if we mixed & matched your hundred fingers with my four fingerprints? what if we let my kundalini...
Cleo Madeleine
do not eat you dry out my tongue, dry off, dry off, wither in my mouth like the ripe white leg of a lamb breach-born, caught dangling between guts and dew, fingers of mist still laid in the valley biscuits in a long cardboard tube sticky with crumbs, the...
Helen May Williams
Winter solstice 2020 13/12/2020 dream haiku small hours of Sunday morning family’s little strength guarded for mourning 17/12/2020 still growing on old apple tree— mistletoe 21/12/2020 the peanut feeder disappears — flap of crows...
Katherine Collins
The unsheltered places The unsheltered in their places might remark if asked, that a pavement at close quarters is like the surface of the moon just before the sun disturbs itself to snuff out, one by one each florescent streetlight’s fizz that crowds...
Charlotte Knight
HELL IS REAL Travelling southbound on Interstate 71, motorists pass a sign which reads HELL IS REAL. It stands in a plowed field and serves as a reminder to all God-fearing farmhands that they must indeed fear God. I am not so easily influenced, I could...