Today’s choice
Previous poems
Ben Verinder
Nostalgia as Yogi Bear
Ruminates through you for something tasty,
prizes of the Jellystone mind.
Lifts a memory from the pic-a-nic basket
of your past and sniffs it excitedly.
He lies about the freshness
of the morsel. Exaggerates its taste.
Hey hey hey, he geysers,
eyes ballooned, pork pie hat
tipped back. Down the hatch!
But the bite is ordinary as air.
Ben Verinder holds an MA in Writing Poetry from The Poetry School and Newcastle University. His debut pamphlet, Botanicals, won the Frosted Fire Firsts competition in 2021. His second, We Lost The Birds, was published by Nine Pens in 2023. His third, How to Save a River, won the Michael Marks Environmental Poet of the Year 2024/5 prize.
James Benger
We tore it all down
just to watch it burn,
standing in that alley
of forgotten refuse.
Graham Clifford
Check the cavities in you where hurt goes,
exactly the right shape to house an insult
like a power tool snug and clipped in its case.
Gill Horitz
I woke to workers with blades
along the verge, yellow-jacketed
to signify contracted rights
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.