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.
Paula R. Hilton
When the genie appears, I’m in a frivolous
mood. First request? My mom’s apple pie.
Alice Huntley
slack in a bag from the freezer aisle
shaken out like shrunken grey memes
I long for the podding of beans
Rhonda Melanson
The magic of growing things, its tangible beauty, I did not understand.
Clive Donovan
I go to the top of the risen hill,
above the trees, beyond the grass,
where only hard ground lives
Gary Akroyde
We searched for it
through the tarmac in every rain-bruised sky
in dark Pennine shadows where great mills
spewed out ringlets of ghost-grey fog
Nathan Curnow
I like to think it’s a story about himself and Einstein
floating in zero gravity, Albert sailing through the capsule
toward his drifting pipe, Brian playing We Will Rock You—
Paul Short
Sleep.
Elusive as lucid dreams.
Closed eyes teem wotsit-orange,
spiderweb scarlet &
thatch-brown
Ash Bowden
Out again with the pitchfork churning
compost into the old green bin, stinking
and silent as an ancient earthen vat.
Mallika Bhaumik
This is not a frilly, mushy love letter
to a city whose allure lies in defying all labels and holding the mystery key to a man’s heart, though none has ever been able to lay an absolute claim on it,