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
Kate Bailey
They’ve mended the park fence again,
patched it over with the usual ugly metalwork,
like a riot barricade.
Ibrar Sami
Across the barren land
where blood once played its savage Holi,
the fearless migratory birds
have returned again.
Anyonita Green
It wobbles slightly, red wine jelly.
I peer at it, nose close enough
to smell the iron, the scent of coagulant,
inhaling through slightly parted lips
Soledad Santana
Seen as she’d hung her cranial lantern
from the roof of her step-father’s garden shed,
the parabolic formula was skipped; like two calves, we followed the fence
to the end of the foot-ball pitch.
Claire Harnett-Mann
Behind the block, the night tears in scrub-calls.
Fox kill scores the morning,
ripped by prints in muck.
Hedy Hume
Stepping into the opposing seat
I smile, and the look I receive
Makes me feel the antisocial one.
Matthew F. Amati
Hands said to Head
look what you’ve made me do
it’s not me, Head said, talk to
Heart, that guy’s sick
Mariam Saidan
‘Female singing constitutes a ‘forbidden act’ (ḥarām),
punishable under Article 638 of the Islamic Penal Code.’
Meg Pokrass
This is what happens when she sits alone in her dining room, eating smoked trout and canned sardines.