Today’s choice
Previous poems
Alex Josephy
A Vision
after Sujata Bhatt
the goddess of the library
extends in cloth-bound curves
along a lettered shelf
sometimes her skirts are leather
trimmed with gold, hems starred
with colophons
in other corners, she’s Make Do
and Mend, relics held together
with browning sellotape
she is all belief, all scepticism;
under her wide cloak
cities cluster, small eyes shine
she sends her children out to play
entrusting them to pockets,
shoulderbags
reliant on the curiosity
of strangers, the way every story
needs to tell itself again, again
when they return late, foxed, stained
with the juices of the world,
she tucks them back, alpha to omega
Alex Josephy lives and writes in Sussex and Italy. Her pamphlet Again Behold the Stars, was a Cinnamon Press award winner 2023. Her third full collection, ‘A Little Bridge’, will be published by Pindrop Press in 2025. www.alexjosephy.net
Kirsty Fox
Winged Kirsty Fox is a writer and artist specialising in ecopoetics. She writes lyric essays and poetry, and has had work published by Apricot Press, Arachne Press, and Streetcake Magazine. She has a Masters in Creative Writing and is currently studying...
Jason Ryberg
Sometimes I’d swear that
the ancient box fan I’ve hauled
around with me for
years is a receiver for
the conversations of ghosts
Peter Wallis
Dead in a chest,
are folded matinee jackets, bonnets, bootees and mitts.
Tissue sighs like the sea at Lowestoft,
always Third week in August
Amanda Bell
We clipped a window through the currant, sat on folding chairs with keep-cups,
wrapped in blankets as we yelled through the prescribed two-metre gap.
Then took to mending – darning socks and patching favourite denims
Anna Maughan
Illness had left me
brittle as frost, icicle-thin
swaddled in borrowed warmth
Angeliki Ampelogianni
on marble tiles bird like
I am a pin measuring drops in the toilet bowl
A W Earl
Doors
My parents’ house became a place of closed white doors,
where sound hung spare and echoes found no junk
or clutter to rest themselves upon.
Finola Scott
Winter dusk soughs in, dark
clouds threaten, tangle her wool.
Huw Gwynn-Jones
Black is the colour inside black light on
blackened brick and slats