Today’s choice

Previous poems

Alex Scarborough

 

 

 

Hiking

I measure distance in Spotify playlists
so I can’t be trusted with maps.
How long until this becomes
exhausting?

You pace out the metres and minutes,
you take three steps ahead as I want to ask
if the ridges in your face would soften
knowing you’d get there faster
without me.

Instead I point out the waterfall
pass you an earbud.

 

 

Alex Scarborough is a poet from Hertfordshire. He studied songwriting at the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance and is currently working on his first poetry pamphlet. His work is forthcoming in Cacti Fur (February 2026).

Opeyemi Oluwayomi

They are piercing knife between
the city, detaching the body from the head,
& squeezing the blood out of the flesh,
so there can be an end to what hasn’t begun.

Rhian Thomas

I sit to fumble some intrusion from my shoe.
A shard of stone, no bigger than a thought, its ridged face
cutting like some old lover, like a baby or
an old preacher drumming something that irks like a worn out song

Erwin Arroyo Pérez

Here, in my Manhattan room / insomnia tugs at me like a half-closed taxi door / letting all the echoes in
/ an ambulance carries the last breath of an asthmatic man

Kweku Abimbola

My father walks backwards
better than most walk forward—
so whenever he sewed his steps into the living
room carpet, I rushed to mirror my moon-
walking, until he froze,
froze like he’d been caught
by the beat.