Today’s choice
Previous poems
Peter Daniels
It Might Never Happen
This is not you, but someone soaked in fake Brut
coming at me in a gesture of fake generosity.
For goodness sake, I only want a quiet life,
it’s no crime not to be a gregarious joiner.
Ultra-polite, ultra-wary, I don’t answer back
but here’s my response to the world in general:
My scowl isn’t personal, it’s just the shape
of my face, and when I smile it’s genuine.
Does not-drinking make me some kind of puritan?
If I could drink gin I’d like it for its whiff of juniper.
I don’t have to take part in their great train robbery
or their tea party trying to be sweet and genteel.
I want you, but I can enjoy Christmas Day on my own
and emerge unsmiling, ready for grey-skied January.
Peter Daniels’ fourth collection is Old Men (Salt, 2024). He has translated Vladislav Khodasévich from Russian, and as queer writer in residence at the London Archives wrote the obscene historical Ballad of Captain Rigby. www.peterdaniels.org.uk
Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig
Dusk is dancing & all the visual technologies at hand feel
overwhelmed: mobile eye, pit pastels, graphic card.
It’s down to language, then, imagine.
Antony Owen
Twenty- something sex are bodies.
thrown down like sophomore prose.
Martin Mooney
The footbridge was skinned in graffiti – slogans, threats,
declarations of love, swastikas. Grek. Kost. Lapse.
Aardhra Chandran
Canvas boots, pig-iron tacks.
At midnight, the wooden platform groans like a hull.
Jason Lovell
While children kneel at your cage in awe
edge offerings of cashew nuts, chopped fruit,
curse words into your magnificent beak,
mums settle carrier bags at tired wet feet
Elijah MacBean
My Name is My Name Ami never let anyone call my sister Sam – it always had to be Samina. She said she’d rather be waterboarded than let her daughter be whitewashed by whites too conservative to spare the extra syllables. Ami never let anyone call...
Damen O’Brien
The coastline’s smile is sharp with blackened teeth,
seabird shelters, scarps, cutaways, broken reefs:
the bloody mouth of a boxer who can’t be dropped,
punch drunk with the brain’s purple pounding . . .
Gwil James Thomas
Terrestrial locomotion
across concrete,
the inverted pendulum,
moving flesh and boot –
Royal Rhodes
The passenger train along the Connecticut shoreline moves as if in a
river of wooden ties and steel rails. . .