Today’s choice
Previous poems
Alex Josephy
DayGlo
after Ecclesiasticus 44.1
Let us now praise hi-vis men
who gather together
round a pothole, filling the gap
with their sticky black remedy.
Honour the yellow-gilet WPC
who knows how to listen,
called to a bus stop
just in time by a lost girl.
Let’s not forget Poppy the neon
lollypop operative,
nor the parakeet-bright
sanitary goods delivery crew.
Tell the DayGlo doozers
how they light our mornings,
gleaming waterproof orange
through the gloom.
Let’s almost die for love
of the one at the very top
of a crane at the boatyard,
sketching an arc in the sky
when his lime green forearm,
matchstick-delicate
from down here, tilts
a lever, sends a loaded pallet
swinging out above the jetty,
calms it to a standstill,
winches it down slo-mo, exactly
where it needs to go.
Alex Josephy lives and writes in Sussex and Italy. Her pamphlet Again Behold the Stars, was a Cinnamon Press award winner 2023. Her third full collection, A Little Bridge, was published by Pindrop Press in 2025. www.alexjosephy.net
Anita Karla Kelly, CE Collins, Clare Painter on International Women’s Day
In the beginning of the end she bit the thing she wasn’t meant to bite.
Apple stuck in her throat, one bite taken, then swallowed whole.
Elaine Baker
To my Ovaries
My cahoonas. My muscular daisies.
Potent white olives. You make me sick.
Jan FitzGerald
What is not to love
when you draw back curtains
and taste clouds
in their newness and innocence
Helen Finney
At my feet the window sprawls a view of kneaded land,
craggy baked by the hand of the gods, dusted green
with short bit grass.
Eugene O’Hare
It hasn’t been this bright all year –
the moon’s white scalp, spot-lit,
a head turned away from a thing
the rest of us fear: unearthly dark
Juliet Humphreys
Though I am not a painter
this is to be a portrait
of my parents and my sister.
Julian Dobson
You too I guess
have studied the surviving starlings
as they swoop and whistle
by the snack trailer at Moorfoot
Mark Czanik
I loved the tales Luke told me of starving writers,
and the sacrifices they made following their hearts.
Philip K Dick eating dog food. Bukowski’s candy bars.
Nigel King
My compass – its needle set with a sliver of blue stone – spins and spins. Breath mists my snow
goggles. I wipe them endlessly. Even in these thick seal-skin mitts my hands are frozen. I have been
no place as still as this.