Today’s choice
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Ian Seed
Draenog
What was the Welsh for ‘hedgehog’? That was what he wanted to know. It was a word he could only remember in his sleep when he dreamt of himself as a small boy, barefoot, back in 1966. The sun was shining. He was wandering across fields and streams, and then what seemed like forever along a winding lane. It was only when he found a hedgehog, dead, stuck to the tarmac with its own flesh, that he realised he had no idea how to find his way back to the campsite where his mum would be making tea. A car swept by. Black bits cut into the soles of his feet.
Ian Seed’s most recent publications include Forgetfulness (Shearsman, 2026), My Outsize Hank Williams Cowboy Hat, with artwork by Lupo Sol (Sacred Parasite, 2025), and The Dice Cup, from the French of Max Jacob (Wakefield, 2023). Find him at www.ianseed.co.uk
Adam Kelly
Determined, you smash against the window
I have to admire you in your striped suit
Sandra Noel
The sea happens to me today
not because I’m the woman in the bakers
brusque turned rude
or the peaches still hard in the bowl
Grace Lynn
Sunlight saunters in long, thin wires through the fallow field
of my bedroom. You approach, a migrating heron
in a runny yolk collar and suntanned shorts, a white-light emissary
of hope. . .
Miriam Swales
I’m waiting for news I don’t want to talk about
and scrolling through old photos to escape.
After some swipes, I see you walking away.
Chris Hardy
The night before we left we smoked opium
for the first time and didn’t sleep.
Angela France
Perhaps some small creature fallen
from where it should be. I am unsure
whether I saw it move.
Adam Horovitz
We cannot update you yet, other than to say we are caught
in a doldrums between stations and that your father can wait
as he has been waiting these past two years . . .
Sue Spiers
A woodpigeon calls
his five-note matins.
Petals ratchet wide
as the sun rises.
Alison Jones
Distance from the ground has become
a way of reminding myself,
how the earth turns her swaying tilt