Today’s choice
Previous poems
Katie Beswick
Can I Kiss You?
We were on my pink love seat
skin touching skin
I was drunk but longing
circled me, like stars
from a cartoon head wound
I nodded
you moved towards me
and as I parted my lips
little hesitations flew as daggers
out my mouth, though I said nothing
just let the momentous wrongness
come at you rapid, sharp
you ducked your lips were hard
and dry we tried –
oh darling we’re still trying now
the baby’s sleeping between us
and there must be some tenderness
I didn’t shred that first night
unpeeling hurts
sour as unripe oranges
you sucked them down.
Well. You said, That was the worst kiss ever.
Katie Beswick is a writer from south east London. Recent/forthcoming poems appear in Under the Radar, And Other Poems, Barrelhouse, Rattle and Narrative Magazine. Her books include Plumstead Pram Pushers (Red Ogre Review 2024) and the hybrid work of poetry, memoir, cultural history and arts criticism Slags on Stage (Routledge 2025). She teaches at Goldsmiths University of London.
Warren Mortimer
& you’ll understand if i leave open this theatre of air
not as the invite for another loss
but to honour their world unwilling to collapse
Jena Woodhouse
Language reinvents itself,
coruscates in signs on walls;
falls silent, mute as clay and stone
on tablets that enshrine its form.
Martin Rieser
The river is an old demon
& my heart is an infirm creature
The river is sure of its way
& my heart is capable of lies.
Sreeja Naskar
glass-tooth morning.
salt mouth.
i left the stove on just to feel wanted.
Gordan Struić
Still —
I kept
writing.
Sometimes
just:
“Hi.”
Margaret Poynor-Clark
Inside my bedroom I take a fresh blade
pull off my jumper, examine the ladder
in front of the mirror cut through my laces
rung by rung
Jenny Hockey
That’s when she went to ground,
after she disobeyed, painted her plastic tea set
red, hidden away in the playhouse they built
down where bindweed draped
Sue Proffitt
You and I have had many talks since you died.
Nick Cooke
If when you go to the barber today
He asks if you’d like him to ‘tidy up your ears’,
Think of all the wildest sprawling vegetation
That will never be tidied, or trimmed, by clippers or shears,