Today’s choice
Previous poems
Huw Gwynn-Jones
Black on Black
Black is the colour inside black light on
blackened brick and slats coaldust and
creosote those sightless eyes black as
his coalman’s vest and grimy coalbent
back
deep in a shed where he stacks cold stone
by the sack by imperial coalblack ton.
Ashcold in the shapeless dawn a father
gathers kindling and coal enough to light
a childhood the blaze and dullred
glow dark soot of a distant black hole.
Retired and living in Orkney, Huw Gwynn-Jones’ work has appeared in Shearsman, Acumen, Tears in the Fence, Ink Sweat & Tears, Stand and Lighthouse. His debut pamphlet The Art of Counting Stars was published in 2021.
LGBT Feature with Godelieve de Bree, Casey Garfield and Anna Maughan
buffoon
untitled exhale
To My Child
Sophie Kearing
sometimes i miss
those carefree days
of driving around
listening to crucial conflict…
Alison Jones
Each year I am looking for signs,
a white pebble, a dropped feather,
shy shadow’s shape, red thread burning…
Nigel King
Convolvulus strangles
cow parsley and nightshade.
Its pure white trumpets plead:
Forgive us! Look how lovely we are…
Eve Chancellor
Payday Mid-afternoon and the streets smell of petrichor; people spilling out of pubs, crowding to smoke cigs in the early spring sunshine. I am alone, again. All my friends live thousands of miles away. I am closer to the people who are not near me...
Fiona Heatlie
Planet Nine You talk to me intently of black holes. I slip my hand into yours, unnoticed. You are absorbed in thoughts astronomical. I am stealing time. Swallowed by a constellation of brighter stars and suddenly you are on the cusp of the cusp of a place where...
Hongwei Bao
Night Market When the night curtain falls, the crowd start to assemble as if drawn by magnets, as if answering a scared call. Neon lights go up along the narrow pavements, illuminating the concentrating faces of food-sellers. Under boiling noodle...
Michael Shann
Early March, after weeks of rain:
between a young oak’s leggy roots,
a cushion of dun, desiccated leaves.
Darren Deeks
You have been burgled.
While you were out with the dog,
a burglar made best use of that
yawning kitchen keyhole to spook
through tracelessly