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.

 

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

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.