Today’s choice
Previous poems
Aardhra Chandran
Chavittu Nadakam
Canvas boots, pig-iron tacks.
At midnight, the wooden platform groans like a hull.
The raw earth shakes below the planks,
cardboard stage-sets buckling under the stride.
The Emperor wears a crown of tinsel,
his beard fixed with stinking spirit-gum.
The heel-strike splinters the cedar wood,
bruising the shin beneath the leather.
A low thrumming runs through timber long after the crowd leaves.
Cedar grain stamped into skin.
Aardhra Chandran is a poet from Kerala, India. Her work has appeared in Eunoia Review, Active Muse, The Punch Magazine, and Borderless Journal, and is forthcoming in other literary journals. Her poetry engages with material landscapes, labour, memory, and the ecological textures of place.
On the Eleventh Day of Christmas we bring you Mary Mulholland, Edward Heathman, Edward Alport
No Nordmann firs in Bethlehem.
No holly or ivy. But pomegranate,
almond, fig and olive trees to anoint
with signs of blessing and peace.
And houses don’t smell of Balsam
On the Tenth Day of Christmas we bring you Rupert Loydell, Ruth Aylett, Eithne Cullen
The village is made of darkness and wood smoke
and the hunting owls sounding from the garrigue.
On the Ninth Day of Christmas we bring you Mark Connors, Michelle Diaz, Sue Finch
Today I am in church again. I have come for silent reflection in one of my favourite seats, but it feels a little closer to the edge than usual.
On the First Day of Christmas we bring you Sarah Mnatzaganian, Rebecca Gethin, Jenni Thorne
Towards the Solstice
owls fly closer in December twilight,
call to each other across the garden.
Martin Fisher
Inside, in the half-light, the iron rot took hold.
Forgotten service–obsolete.
Salt-coin neglect.
The money flowed inland,
Moored on an hourglass choke.
No one told the sea.
Craig Dobson
Out of morning
a misted light,
glowing fire
in the air.
Steven Taylor
A very long time ago
Stephen Fry’s godfather, the
Justice, Sir Oliver Popplewell
Who chaired the inquiry
Into the Bradford City
Amirah Al Wassif
Beneath my armpit lives a Sinbad the size of a thumb.
His imagination feeds through an umbilical cord tied to my womb.
Now and then, people hear him speaking through a giant microphone—
Singing,
Cracking jokes,
Mark Smith
In the portacabin that morning, men smoked
and looked at last week’s paper again.
There was no water to fill the urn.
The first job – to get connected