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.
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
Rachel Lewis
I step through missing bricks.
Green graves cluster
on a rise under a yew…
Kexin Huang
She came growling at me like a wolf,
muttering moonlight out of her throat
Joe Crocker
Hold a rule beside her measured look.
Precisely fix the time it took
to meet and break away.
David Adger
being unnatural
he fixes his sight past the fields
of bere and oat and the woods
of birch, his goat-eyes watch
two worlds at once
NJ Hynes
It was so quiet she could hear her hair grow,
heartbeat stretch across measures, nails twist
into mobius strips . . .
Steph Morris
from another picture swiped a nice cyan
tore the lemon horrors off it
and slapped it straight
in this picture . . .
Amlanjyoti Goswami
In one of those colourful stalls
A gentle man with golden fingers
Carves a wheelbarrow from broken wood
Jacquie Wyatt
I think of that study that showed
the smaller the animal
the slower time passes for them…