Today’s choice
Previous poems
Huw Gwynn-Jones
Black on Black
Black is the colour inside black light on
blackened brick and slats coaldust and
creosote those sightless eyes black as
his coalman’s vest and grimy coalbent
back
deep in a shed where he stacks cold stone
by the sack by imperial coalblack ton.
Ashcold in the shapeless dawn a father
gathers kindling and coal enough to light
a childhood the blaze and dullred
glow dark soot of a distant black hole.
Retired and living in Orkney, Huw Gwynn-Jones’ work has appeared in Shearsman, Acumen, Tears in the Fence, Ink Sweat & Tears, Stand and Lighthouse. His debut pamphlet The Art of Counting Stars was published in 2021.
David Belcher
I’m worn out by talk of devastation I walk out the door, turning back to twist the key in the sticky lock. On the street my first impulse is to look around, tilt my ear to the faintest sounds, summon a semblance of optimism; but looking for the...
Wayne F. Burke
I Know Rainy Nights the wet cold touch the splatter and drip in wind swept mist and black as pitch streets lit by red and green scrawls and torches of scalding headlights. Wayne F. Burke's poetry has been widely published online and...
Katherine Stockton
Hibernation Girl I feel the summer days in winter & winter days through summer. In transitional seasons I do nothing at all but revise how to survive. How easy it is to transmute between you and the next love that I can already see coming. As...
Zoe Broome
Between Sunsets We danced like madmen all night in our tap shoes – knitter knatter, pitter patter. A prancing pair we were, from pub to pub. Always drunk, we puffed gutter-stubs. Knowing no daylight, we rose vamplike each sundown. We stank of our...
Erin Russell
canyon meme we’re the kids so swole so cocksure cowboy cool in leather boots stampede serrating mountain ridge our lump-karst slick-boy Johnston gorge- ing on feathering algae, curious syntax, jagged gaps in the treeline behind— telling...
Niles Reddick
Jury Duty When the official summons from the Sheriff’s department arrived in my mail box, I thought I’d been caught speeding again by the camera at an intersection in town, or they were soliciting for the Sheriff’s reelection. I was surprised it was a...