Today’s choice
Previous poems
Peter Daniels
It Might Never Happen
This is not you, but someone soaked in fake Brut
coming at me in a gesture of fake generosity.
For goodness sake, I only want a quiet life,
it’s no crime not to be a gregarious joiner.
Ultra-polite, ultra-wary, I don’t answer back
but here’s my response to the world in general:
My scowl isn’t personal, it’s just the shape
of my face, and when I smile it’s genuine.
Does not-drinking make me some kind of puritan?
If I could drink gin I’d like it for its whiff of juniper.
I don’t have to take part in their great train robbery
or their tea party trying to be sweet and genteel.
I want you, but I can enjoy Christmas Day on my own
and emerge unsmiling, ready for grey-skied January.
Peter Daniels’ fourth collection is Old Men (Salt, 2024). He has translated Vladislav Khodasévich from Russian, and as queer writer in residence at the London Archives wrote the obscene historical Ballad of Captain Rigby. www.peterdaniels.org.uk
Sylvie Jane Lewis
Being quiet and easily tired by being alive among people, I take
the cowardly route to community. I curate a digital garden of oddity.
At best my phone is a menagerie of queers: trinket makers, amateur
playwrights, witches, and, over and over again, my own personal monarchy.
Maryam Alsaeid
Maybe after your bath—
you will sit for a moment,
the towel will hold you close
like a quiet prayer—
Steve Komarnyckyj, Anna Bowles and Lynnda Wardle for Holocaust Memorial Day
where I saw you praying through the angle of the door
Now hangs only in my mind I breathe on its glass wipe away fly specks
Annie Wright
Sing silver times, shimmering columns
of light on the wine-dark, temple
to moon-eyed Hecate, the insatiable.
Magnus McDowall
We rolled out on Seven Sisters Road,
two crates of Tyskie empty in my stairwell.
We were talking from the chest, walking backwards
crackling air above our heads like streetlights
Yucheng Tao
But look here, I turned my head
and discovered the Denver Museum
waiting,
nerve, a soft-boned
species hums
Sarah Boyd
He’s a house of cards, a delicately balanced pyramid
held together by hearing aids and dusty bifocals and
wobbling dentures and ageing pacemaker and
shirt with three buttons missing in action and
Samantha Carr
You became obsessed with nucleated red blood cells when you peeked through an
aperture window at your liquid, viscous nature. You became obsessed with maps
Helen Akers
we’re trying to construct a frame for this
‘highly reactive impulsive emotion’
the nurse is looking into it