Today’s choice

Previous poems

Ben Verinder

 

 

 

Nostalgia as Yogi Bear

Ruminates through you for something tasty,
prizes of the Jellystone mind.

Lifts a memory from the pic-a-nic basket
of your past and sniffs it excitedly.

He lies about the freshness
of the morsel. Exaggerates its taste.

Hey hey hey, he geysers,
eyes ballooned, pork pie hat

tipped back. Down the hatch!
But the bite is ordinary as air.

 

 

Ben Verinder holds an MA in Writing Poetry from The Poetry School and Newcastle University. His debut pamphlet, Botanicals, won the Frosted Fire Firsts competition in 2021. His second, We Lost The Birds, was published by Nine Pens in 2023.  His third, How to Save a River, won the Michael Marks Environmental Poet of the Year 2024/5 prize.

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.