Today’s choice
Previous poems
Anya Reeve
Walnut
Stubborn, we closed our fists
To better ward away the brume
From inner life, our threads of blood.
The cold an outward skin to glove
A sacred, futured inwardness.
Year’s end will scuff and scrape.
Grey ice, slush. Men worry
The postal; fish is wrapped.
Snow keeps the fewterer;
Passage is trapped.
Hidden is the one bright eye—
Lozenged singularly into bark—
The seed or pip of steadfastness,
The kernel kept against the dark.
Anya Reeve was recently shortlisted for the Philip Hoare Prize for Non-Fiction, 2025. Venues include Tears in the Fence (forthcoming), LINSEED Journal (forthcoming), Snow lit rev, The Rumen, Blumenhaus Magazine, the Modernist Review, the Oxonian Review, Gifts Returned by the River (2025) ed. Iain Sinclair. Website: anyareeve.cargo.site
Peter Leight
There’s more waste than we use for the things we ordinarily use waste for, such as piling it on barges and sending them out to sea, tucking it under the surface like a layer of insulation . . .
John Grey
there are some lives
lived poolside
and others that
mostly consist of
a bent back in a field –
Adam Flint
All summer automatic exits remain
open, and no one leaves or boards.
David Van-Cauter
You are pleased to see me
in my gothic T-shirt –
those bats, you say, have been your friends.
Mark Wyatt
yes of course/ it was idyllic, reclining (pint of/ cider in hand) poolside in the harvesting/ sunlight
Catherine Shonack
when confronted with vast, endlessness of the ocean
who wouldn’t go mad?
Ansuya Patel
Women scrape coins from their purse,
count pennies, one lifts up a watermelon
in mid-air like raising a newborn to light.
Pippa Little
a woman’s rage cannot raise the dead
but it may split stone like lightning
Abiodun Salako
a boy grows tired
of dying again and again.
i am building him a morgue
for Thanksgiving.