Today’s choice
Previous poems
Simon Maddrell
Bringing Pilates to Attention
Four years in Knockaloe was a living
inspiration for inventor Joseph Pilates.
His self-contained exercise in mental-
physical health spawned a method which
he called Contrology — corrective drills
grown within the camp. All of them
rounded up & shipped there demonstrates
the art of controlled body movements.
Alien detainment being The Universal
Reformer — a piece of equipment feeling
& looking like a workout rather than what
it really is — a non-regulated professional
practice. Albeit 3,000 guards won’t agree
considering their emphasis on alignment.
The Spine Corrector, Ladder Barrel and
Pedi-Poles were used for issues confined
to a prescribed area. However, there is no
proof that any of this improved balance
or even does now — proof that there are
only some things you can make right.
Simon Maddrell appears in Gutter, Magma, Poetry Wales, SAND, Southword, The Rialto, Under the Radar, and many others. Their sixth pamphlet is Patient L1 (Polari Press, 2025). Out-Spoken Press will publish Simon’s debut collection in Feb 2026. Find @simonmaddrell almost everywhere. Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/simonmaddrell Website: https://www.simonmaddrell.com
Tina Sederholm
Vertigo Approaching midnight and the gouges of a mountain lean over us, weeping boulders. Each bend is a hook, hauling us higher. The car howls like a colicky child. I grip the door, you tug at the wheel, a cracked silence thrumming about whose...
Cara L McKee
Our Stories Have Been Told To Us Our stories have been told to us, worse we told them, wove them in and out our lives, back and forth and last and first our stories have been told to us, worse to pull them out leaves an absence, a curse, though...
Antony Owen
When I had a mental illness I just can’t beat it (Quote from Manchester by the Sea) In the unaccounted hours I used to wake up awake. One night I awoke with semen all over my legs I dreamt that I was sexual and wished, and wished, in the glue of...
Lucy Smith
Difference The two women cook together in the kitchen with the back door open. They swear and cackle about their boyfriends’ penises. When the sun gets lower in the sky they go out with their steaming plates and sit cross-legged on the tiny lawn...
Simon Bowden
Low Heath Wake hearing driven rain and darkness. Little lights along the shore. People shuffle in corridors, doors clunk, beeps reveal patients’ oxygen, heat, blood-force. I dreamed a sickly landscape, my home above the harbour, low heath,...
Katherine Meehan
Sprout I confess I am an idiot who believes in luck and the mania of new projects. If you drive these up to the mountains for the weekend, they may grow a sprout, and you may be allowed a tinfoil hat and a bird familiar. Seek vortices in rural...
Amit Shankar Saha
Runes The water was everywhere but not our awareness of it. We only knew the ice -- the age of ice was when we lived our mammoth lives, sabre toothed towards extinction. At the onset of the great thaw we were reborn evolved, undergone mutation....
Bethany W Pope
Year of the Plague There have been plagues, before. There has been death, spreading like a blanket drawn across the face of the world. There will always be fear, of war, of famine, all of those abysmal things which are too big for us to picture,...
Peter Burrows
Night Train Tall lights beam downwards blanking the night sky casting long sleeping shadows across the yard. Darkness edges the mainline. A taxi, yellow light on, returns over the bridge. Slow, uncertain shunting starts up. Stops. Rain tries,...