Today’s choice

Previous poems

Gail Webb

by | Feb 26, 2026 | ,

 

 

 

Something Missing

He cuts. I lie still, teach myself
to dream of St David’s Bay,
seaweed strewn on incoming tides,
surfers slice big waves in half.

He butchers with hammer, saw.
No nightmares, though he says
it’s possible-you could wake
in the middle of the operation,

stirred by loud banging. I advise
him to knock me out good
and proper. We both know the truth,
he will take something from me,

cut flesh away, file bone, move
kneecap, sever nerves, tendons.
He promises to replace pain
with a super joint, a hero.

I come round, crying, smell
of blood and piss. The body knows
muscle and bone are gone.
For months, messages arrive

in my brain, something’s missing.
He does not acknowledge,
it’s part of my DNA now, this loss.

 

Gail Webb is a Bridport Prize short-listed poet. Gail facilitates creative writing at Maggies Centre and in her local community. Her current work focuses on grief, resilience, climate crisis, human connections to the natural world.
Insta: poetry_cocktail

T. N. Kennedy

by | May 23, 2025 | ,

so you collect those poems which reveal
life at its most intense and solitary
turning them on when you most need to feel

Mariah Whelan

by | May 22, 2025 | ,

      St Ann’s Square Manchester, 23rd May 2017 Because I cannot show you what is at the centre of all this I will lay language up to its edge, walk its edges the way I moved through the back of the crowd too afraid to go in. I had to shade my eyes from...

Marissa Glover

by | May 21, 2025 | ,

    What Might Have Been There is a small white house high on a green hill just south of Scotland, an office bright with books and a window overlooking Magdalene, and somewhere on a dirt road between endless pastures of strong red fescue, is a man on a...

Cherry Doyle

by | May 20, 2025 | ,

/ on the days / blood rushes at the corner of a nail / you cannot keep your jumper off the door handle / table tackles leg / expect the bruise in two days’ time / pansies nodding in speckles of rain /