Today’s choice
Previous poems
Natasha Gauthier
Roman curses
Nobody knows what Cicero’s gardener whistled
to his figs and olives, what the consul’s young wife
hummed to herself while slaves combed beeswax
and perfumed oils from Carthage into her hair.
Did bawdy odes to Octavia’s backside
(Ah, Maximus, she is plump as an Iberian mare)
flow from the taverns Ostia, Massilia, Aquae Sulis?
The Romans, leaving behind no music,
choked their sacred springs with curses.
Tiny, jagged metal tongues folded over
and over upon themselves, rolled over
and over like olive pits in vinegar mouths.
Oh goddess, may the thief who stole
my best gloves lose his mind and his eyes.
Minerva sighs at these razorblade grievances,
sulfurous prayers etched in bile, she is bored,
would prefer to be getting songs about figs,
olives, emperors, Octavia’s ample bottom,
instead of junkmail grudges piling up,
centuries-deep, at her patient doorstep
Natasha Gauthier is a Canadian poet living in Cardiff. She won First Prize in the 2024-25 Poetry Wales Awards, and won the 2025 Borzello Trust/New Welsh Review Prize for poetry. Her debut collection will be published by Parthian next year.
Joe Williams
I was born in a town of shadows.
Anne Symons
She was only a little woman
five feet nothing in nylon stockings.
‘If I stood sideways they’d mark me absent.’
Ben
When she said ‘could’, it was clearly in italics
and when she said ‘one day’, the creak of glaciers
shuddered around its edges.
Dragana Lazici
the days are long but the years are short.
seconds are tiny kitchen knives in my back.
i stopped reading Dickinson, her voice is a sad parrot.
Abigail Ottley
Faces, unless they come swimming up close. are a blur of piggy-pink and ice-
cream. In the street, she doesn’t know, cannot be certain when to smile, when to
look away
Maggie Mackay
The teacher is an old spindly man. Grim, out of a Grimm’s tale. Scarecrow hair, thinning. Unsmiling.
Natasha Gauthier
The tawny clutch appeared
on high-heeled evenings only,
slept in a nest of white tissue.
Romy Morreo
She only speaks to me these days
through groaning floorboards in the night
and slammed doors.
Emma Simon
No-one has seen a ghost while breast-feeding
despite the unearthly hours, the half-light
mad sing-song routines of rocking a child
back to sleep.