Today’s choice
Previous poems
Clive Donovan
Three Winds
I go to the top of the risen hill,
above the trees, beyond the grass,
where only hard ground lives
—and three winds mingle, whispering,
all merging in a jostle.
They use my body frame to make sound
and, listening, I hear, as they tell
where they’ve been and where they go:
You, man, with a gravestone in your heart,
let us shake your woes away
and they do, they really do,
they rattle my teeth with generosity.
I retreat,
my cold hands in empty pockets,
full of the wisdom of the great silence.
Clive Donovan has three poetry collections, The Taste of Glass [Cinnamon Press 2021], Wound Up With Love [Lapwing 2022] and Movement of People [Dempsey&Windle 2024] and is published in a wide variety of magazines including Acumen, Crannog, Ink Sweat & Tears, Prole and Stand.
Kate Garrett on International Women’s Day
A few things cunning women do “…the virtue of word, herb, & stone: which is used by unlawful charms, without natural causes.” – King James VI & I, Daemonologie Accessorise dirt-scuffed jeans with bramble-stain lips – three hares away from...
Jo Bratten
In the shower with Gerard Manley Hopkins Bless me father for I have sinned again Rejoice in soapy foam-fleece fountain furled For I have lied and cursed and fucked with men Flashing quenching sing-shower curtain-curled In hurting self and friend...
Sanjeev Sethi
A Factory of Feelings Your biog is your own, wash it with as many adjectives. Entitlement and empathy are opposites. Dissimulation is elementary to past lovers, like dissemble to ex bosses. Facebook and Twitter are placeboes for amour proper....
Kitty Coles
The moon is a cannibal: she consumes her own body. Flat-footed in her fatness, she sweats and lumbers, ashamed, in the pure of night, of her vast heft. She nibbles her flesh: the taste is oily, repellant, but she swallows it down: the gulps rise...
Lucy Dixcart
Princess Alexandra and the Glass Piano I was a child when I swallowed the piano. My jaw unhinged and down it slid: keys, strings, pins. A dream, I imagined, until a crunch punctuated my footsteps and hammers chinked holes in my thoughts. Rules to...
Steph Morris
Three halves Help yourselves, Alex says, places chocolate on the table, and opens the wrapper, silver wings on all four sides. Three of them, at one end of the table. Charlie cracks a chunk free, one whole end of the bar at a jaunty angle, and...
Janet Rogerson
Ghost I was outside in the square dull of garden when I realised I couldn't draw a ghost. The page waited patiently like the future and my eye held what was supposed to fill it. The narrow path which didn't deserve its name was an appropriate...
UEA Poetry MA Scholars Memoona Zahid and Konstantin Rega
In 2011, IS&T publisher Kate Birch established the The Ink Sweat & Tears Poetry Writing Scholarship (MA) at the University of East Anglia (UEA); Konstantin Nicholas Rega is its ninth recipient. Memoona Zahid is the second student to be awarded The Birch Family...
Lydia Harris
Eliza Traill All her names The hare. A long way from blue. What is the third thing? Twelve snow buntings in a shadow house. What she sees A large stone lintel. A hollow enclosed in a curved wall. Small white bones. A now completed circle. The...