Today’s choice
Previous poems
Colin Pink
Thorny (One Sided Conversations No4)
after seeing Akram Khan’s Giselle 18 Jan 2026
to embrace you is like clasping
a fist full of briars
if your mouth was an envelope
I’d lick it shut
you can push all you like against
the wall between
the living and the dead
but it won’t give
yet I hunger still
cannot forget the taste of you
your honeysuckle heart
is held in my grasp
and there is nowhere on earth
to put it down
Colin Pink co-chairs the Barnes & Chiswick poetry stanza. His books of poems are: Acrobats of Sound (2016), The Ventriloquist Dummy’s Lament (2019), Typicity (2021) and Wreck of the Jeanne Gougy (2021).
Bel Wallace
My dad is thinking geometrically,
eyes closed; he waves his arms
Sarah Crowe
they gave me the cold
cap to stop my chemo
hair falling out
Daniel Dean
A beastly man swallowing leeks. His throat
Is dirt, and yet his ghost could sit with Raphael
Lesley Burt
a conch found in hot white sand
on the shoreline at Sanur Beach
a Fibonacci whorl
among morning offerings
Annie Acre
i am sun-shot / green-beamed / stem-steep /
hands cupfuls of heartlines / conjuring water
Jennifer Cole
take your wedding ring
or it might get “disappeared”
Eithne Longstaff
On the road to Belfast today, I failed
to recognise my father. I saw a flamingo
by the Tamnnamore turn off, but paid
little regard as it took off…
Mark O’Connor
At half a tonne in weight
It was like the anchor –
Michael Mintrom
They lie deep in a forest, wounds
unseen, unhealed. Further back,
an escarpment with dark scars.