Today’s choice
Previous poems
Hannah Ward
Mark A. Murphy
If You / Then We If you are leaving Mohr and Mohme for Brighton then we are iron and steam and if you are walking alone at night then we are moon and Dog Star and if you are suffering with first-night nerves then we are Hamlet and Ophelia and if...
Julian Brasington
Home to the Hebrides Where are you running to what are you looking for rooting in other people’s abandonments scraping time off the earth into spoil for stone some sign of burning a flicker of bone someone’s life to ponder their gut to digest...
Joseph Cooper
medusa the narcissist self-preservation is really something ongoing and terminal they loved taxes they loved death certain things create an emotional reaction self-contemplation is coldly detached apparently the inevitable end of introspection led...
Finola Scott
Tell me again in this ragged midnight that intimacy will endure waters aren't rising and tomorrow the fritillary butterfly will graze my garden tell me that passion is not merely nocturnal but a tsunami of connection no stormy tea-cup but the...
Gary Jude
Birds Everyone held a bird, except you. A policeman eyed you suspiciously. You followed the crowd into the square. When the clock struck noon, everyone lifted their bird aloft. Some snapped necks and wings, or let their bird fly. A wife watched...
Fiona Theokritoff
Smickling I am as useless as a coronet, have lost a shoal of bloodied runts. Who shall assist me? Perhaps a ripe and red-faced peasant with more brats than she can raise. I need her shoes, I need a charm to stick what quickens to its cage. Perhaps...
Mark Valentine
The Road to Chalvington at Dusk Cast out from Eden he journeyed along the roads of dog-rose in the cloaky overcoat of good tweed and lit a cigarette cupped against the wind so that his fingers glowed and took that first best draught of it and...
Alan Dunnett
Descent Into Hades In order to discover what took place, I eventually made a descent by slow ratcheting, hard and easy, caught at last by the moment despite warnings and my own considerations. Your face appears before me and your will, unbent at...
Padrika Tarrant on National Flash Fiction day
An Escape In the back room’s desiccated atmosphere, the spiders stole one another’s shoes and sang their clever songs with their elbows folded. The shelf of hats stood to stiff attention, three coal black and a female in splendid blue that came...