Today’s choice
Previous poems
Gemma Blakeley
My Dad Complains That The Hedges Are Overgrown
and the word bemuses me, implying as it does
the concept of excess in what can only be good.
Why do we crave these straight lines and
clean edges? The hedge itself
is a border, a defining.
A this is mine.
And this is yours.
A there and here.
An us and them.
Why not let it keep a little wildness?
Not for me this lopping and shaping,
this trimming and taming,
ruling and restricting-
Hear this- there are things
which cannot be governed, like
certain tendrilous tendencies
of a hedgerow heart
and those sacred things which live inside…
Father, I will not reach for the blade.
There is no such thing as too alive.
Gemma Blakeley is a teacher, mother, nature-lover and aspiring writer. She will have her first poetry published in Black Bough Poetry‘s Winter 2026 Anthology later this year. She lives in Shropshire with her husband, two children and the cat.
Anyonita Green
It wobbles slightly, red wine jelly.
I peer at it, nose close enough
to smell the iron, the scent of coagulant,
inhaling through slightly parted lips
Soledad Santana
Seen as she’d hung her cranial lantern
from the roof of her step-father’s garden shed,
the parabolic formula was skipped; like two calves, we followed the fence
to the end of the foot-ball pitch.
Claire Harnett-Mann
Behind the block, the night tears in scrub-calls.
Fox kill scores the morning,
ripped by prints in muck.
Hedy Hume
Stepping into the opposing seat
I smile, and the look I receive
Makes me feel the antisocial one.
Matthew F. Amati
Hands said to Head
look what you’ve made me do
it’s not me, Head said, talk to
Heart, that guy’s sick
Mariam Saidan
‘Female singing constitutes a ‘forbidden act’ (ḥarām),
punishable under Article 638 of the Islamic Penal Code.’
Meg Pokrass
This is what happens when she sits alone in her dining room, eating smoked trout and canned sardines.
Chen-ou Liu
this fresh morning
so much like the others …
yet starlings shape-shift
Jim Paterson
A Tuesday morning in November
out on the street taking in the bins.
As a flight of crows flashed past
the street lights went out.