Today’s choice
Previous poems
Vanessa Napolitano
A bit OCD
Floors are unvacuumed. Spices remain un-alphabetised.
I bless the spaces between the furniture to keep everyone safe. Seven.
I do not arrive exactly on time. Margins can keep their default size.
I would like you to promise me this isn’t poison. This supermarket chicken.
I do not straighten any of the objects on my desk.
I have seen the word crash on three magazine covers, which must be a sign.
I have clutter on my bookshelves and coffee rings on the little table.
I move the little tables to make the spaces right. Seven.
Reports do not say I am a perfectionist.
If I say the prayer wrong, I say the prayer again.
Gosh, that’s a dark thought, I’m sure you’d say.
If I say the prayer wrong, I say the prayer again (seven) –
If I say the prayer wrong,
I say the prayer again.
Vanessa Napolitano is a Yorkshire-based writer and was a Word Up North New Northern Poet 2025. She has published four books, including the chapbook the lives we had before with Stanchion Press in 2026. Her work can be found in And Other Poems, Interpreter’s House and Alchemy Spoon. Find her @nessanapolitano_ on instagram, and @ Moette on X.
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
Jenny Robb
By the light of a wolf moon,
my father turns mad.
Anne whispers to a girl in the wind,
and a friend blows into my life.
Diane Webster
Squirrels dream of a cougar,
a cougar given permission
to crouch like an assassin
awaiting its prey . . .