Today’s choice

Previous poems

Kim Cullen

 

 

 

Being Morandi’s Bottle

I pull a dress over my head
calm foggy blue linen
sleeved in lavender,
press frizzed hair
between two hot blades.

I drag a lipliner
across my cupid’s bow
like a violinist gliding
hair over string
hovering on a velvety G.

I cut a lock of mine
and dip it into cream paint,
cover each inch of my skin
in fleshy brushstrokes,
imperfectly human.

I spread butter-yellow tights up my legs,
pale shins gleaming through.
In a rectangle of quietness
my extending slender neck
rests tenderly on my body.

Beneath my thighs, the slanted table
is a plain of olive green,
and steel blue hints of cast shadows.
Light hits the soft curve
of my lumbar spine –

like a cashmere decrescendo,
weaving into limestone grey.
Out there: AI-generated
Starry Nights indistinguishable
to an untrained eye.

Rolling news of military strikes
and dead bodies pinging next to bikini pics
of ambiguously aged girls
while I hide in my pocket
of supple harmony.

 

 

Kim Cullen is a dual-national poet. By exploring identity, her work creates new pockets of belonging. She has been published by Four Tulips Publishing, Poetry and Audience, From Arthur’s Seat, and Tenter Hook. She won the Alison Morland Prize 2025.

Magnus McDowall

We rolled out on Seven Sisters Road,
two crates of Tyskie empty in my stairwell.

We were talking from the chest, walking backwards
crackling air above our heads like streetlights

Sarah Boyd

He’s a house of cards, a delicately balanced pyramid
held together by hearing aids and dusty bifocals and
wobbling dentures and ageing pacemaker and
shirt with three buttons missing in action and

Samantha Carr

You became obsessed with nucleated red blood cells when you peeked through an
aperture window at your liquid, viscous nature. You became obsessed with maps

Helen Akers

we’re trying to construct a frame for this
‘highly reactive impulsive emotion’
the nurse is looking into it   

Jenny Robb

By the light of a wolf moon,
my father turns mad.
Anne whispers to a girl in the wind,
and a friend blows into my life.