Today’s choice
Previous poems
Pippa Little
A woman is scrubbing a grave
A woman is scrubbing a grave
but the blood remains
a woman dreams of a brown beast
driven mad and knows it is herself
a woman believes the voice in her mind
nurses the splinter of glass in her heart
a woman may defend herself
and lay herself open in the same breath
a woman’s rage cannot raise the dead
but it may split stone like lightning
Pippa Little‘s last collection Time Begins to Hurt came out from Arc in 2022. She’s working on her next book and teaching poetry for the Faber Academy in Newcastle.
Teika Marija Smits
An Early Lesson in Fake News One paper said that my mother, The Venus of Vodka, was blonde; another that The Russian Doll was a sexy redhead. A third was certain that the nude model, From Russia With Love, was brunette. She planned world...
Nisha Bhakoo
Tenant Tides rise as I sleep. I wake up to a desert mouth and the sound of drilling. Panic shooting up spine. The scaffolding holding the building together usually blocks out the feeble Berlin, February sun. But a ray reaches my forehead today....
Yuanbing Zhang translates Hongri Yuan
Each Rock is A Potala Palace The sunshine is mellow wine and there are golden palaces inside the sun. Where a giant is its master, he told me that I was his shadow on the earth. I will still be much greater, like a mountain, each rock is a Potala...
Nina Parmenter
Weak Core I have hauled laundry, sucker-punched Tuesday, bent, switched and twisted, and my spine despises me. You have a weak core, she says. Should be pulling up and in, she says. Imagine a stuffed burlap sack half-hanging from a squealing...
Oz Hardwick
The Debussy Bus Stop Everything breaks sooner or later: keys, kettles, musical boxes, the clay hare on the mantelpiece. Out of habit, I carry the keys for all the houses I’ve left behind, and though I no longer remember which would fit...
Annie Kissack
Bellissimo at the Garden Party Spiked second-cousin to a daisy, All the joy and twice the size. I like your pincushion roundness and the plump solar illusion at your centre while all around you clump ragged rays of deepest pink, close packed as a...
Zoe Ellsmore
Six weeks after I could taste it for weeks after the birth - the metal rust, wet earth, smell of the birth I bled mountains of glistening rubies so the walls of our house swelled with the birth I waited in bare blue hospital rooms to see if I was...
Philip Foster
She goes to Germany I go to Germany and spend time with Klaus but he doesn’t tell Sue. We sit outside and play cards, we take out old photographs. It’s the time of insects, like wasps, which persist and make me nervous. Picture his older sisters...
Paul Grant
Something Sometimes Waking up I remember Exactly nothing Forget who And what I am, Forget why And when I look out the window See a blue sky A few clouds Go about doing Little of much And it's good Great even But slowly Memory Starts to crawl over...