Today’s choice
Previous poems
Charles G. Lauder
Craftsmanship
beneath night’s skin he unearths raw stones
serrated encrusted enigmatic cold
tumbling them in two-twenty grit wears away the dull
four hundred six hundred highlights the delicate
garnet’s exposed seam agate’s brittle dendrites
whilst softest serpentine disintegrates to dust
in quiet solitude he worries
facets of captured moonlight won’t be enough
in the age of electric light blue light
boutiques and diners that never shut
the glow of irrelevance radiates
Charles G. Lauder, Jr, is an American poet who lives in the UK. He’s the author of the collection The Aesthetics of Breath (V.Press, 2019) and three pamphlets, the most recent being Year of the Rat (Blueprint Poetry Press, 2025).
Elizabeth Osmond
Difficult doctors don’t care about their patients,
They are filling up hospitals and GP practices with their difficult bodies.
They are often late to work and shuffle into handover . . .
Jay Whittaker
. . . .We would go
to the cupboard where multi-packs
of Fine Fare’s basic crisps were sorted
into old shoe boxes, one for each child.
Kate Maxwell
I’d rather be inside
pretending I’m not
pretending commentary
inside my head
is real and here
Jim Murdoch
Some things we hold in trust,
some we forget we even own
and then there’re those items
we hang onto “just in case.”
Andrew McDonnell on Father’s Day
Somewhere to get to The light is growing in the East the headlights skim the road that runs beside the flooded fields we’re a month off blossom when it comes I will drape myself in the year’s renewal and ask how many times I will see my little...
Anna Lewis
With the neon-splashed night at the window
I counted each contraction down, obediently,
as my mother had told me to do.
Bobbie Sparrow
You ask me why
I put myself through that,
as if I jumped out of a plane
14,000 feet of fear and longing.
Chris Rice
You wake up (so you tell me)
to the lurid gold of summer
splashed like paint across
your tea-brown walls
Karin Molde
Fortuna rolls the dice in Tumahole Free State, South Africa I have never seen a baby so tiny outside a womb. You hold her jigsaw of bones in a blanket, afraid to scatter the pieces in case they’d sail like seeds onto the road. A dung beetle rolls...