Today’s choice

Previous poems

Sharon Black

 

 

 

Free Range

My thoughts are skittish,
peck at whatever they find.

I flick each whitewash flake
into the bin. Shadows on the walls

are darkened rooms
in which I lose myself, daily:

if I say that I look for this
at the edge of every brightness

would you hand me a prescription?
The house is rustling, I can’t get out.

I have a tongue for truth
and a tongue for lies. My mouth

is dry, all this barking. People say
I have something of the fox.

 

 

Sharon Black is from Glasgow and lives in the Cévennes mountains in France. Her fifth full collection of poetry, Things That Fruit in Darkness, was published in May 2026 by Vagabond Voices. She is editor of Pindrop Press.  www.sharonblack.co.uk

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.