Today’s choice
Previous poems
Peter Devonald
Father
He is sulphur, he is fire
and brimstone, he is deep
shame, the colour of night,
sound of slamming doors.
He is bitterest regrets,
dark chocolate, olives and kale,
The Telegraph and Magritte’s
pipe, the treachery of images.
Moments replayed on repeat,
light goes on underneath a door,
locking of bedrooms, moss and ivy
on windows, a crack of light, still.
The air sours with acrid shampoo,
turgid reek of cigars and alcohol,
it’s hard to pretend and play at
happy families, rigor mortis grin.
We cling to positives, desperate,
distressed, we do it to ourselves,
you do realise that, don’t you?
Stilted breath sucked from rooms.
Peter Devonald is a multi-award-winning Stockport writer. Winner Broken Spine Readers’ Choice Award 2025, Loft Books Best Poem 2024, Waltham Forest 2022, FofHCS, two HoH’s, runner-up Shelley Memorial and N2tS 2024. Widely-published/anthologised. Forward Prize, two BotN and Children’s Bafta nominated. linktr.ee/pdevonald x.com/petedevonald
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.
Patrick Wright
It’s as if the dream
is telling me we are still joined
somehow, despite waking
and me trudging on, even though
your voicemail is off, your locks
changed.
William Collins
We carry the shame of Paragraph 352D
folded into suitcases at foreign borders,
where love is questioned like a crime,
and disbelief stamped heavier than visas.
They tell us to run for our lives —
but only if we can do it quietly.
Oz Hardwick
The ghost of my mother knows the names of everything, but
she can’t tell me, because ghosts, whatever you have heard
to the contrary, can’t speak.
McLord Selasi
I walk the flat barefoot,
step over old dreams
still curled like cats
in the corners.