Today’s choice

Previous poems

Sharon Black

 

 

 

Free Range

My thoughts are skittish,
peck at whatever they find.

I flick each whitewash flake
into the bin. Shadows on the walls

are darkened rooms
in which I lose myself, daily:

if I say that I look for this
at the edge of every brightness

would you hand me a prescription?
The house is rustling, I can’t get out.

I have a tongue for truth
and a tongue for lies. My mouth

is dry, all this barking. People say
I have something of the fox.

 

 

Sharon Black is from Glasgow and lives in the Cévennes mountains in France. Her fifth full collection of poetry, Things That Fruit in Darkness, was published in May 2026 by Vagabond Voices. She is editor of Pindrop Press.  www.sharonblack.co.uk

Jason Lovell

While children kneel at your cage in awe
edge offerings of cashew nuts, chopped fruit,
curse words into your magnificent beak,
mums settle carrier bags at tired wet feet

Elijah MacBean

      My Name is My Name Ami never let anyone call my sister Sam – it always had to be Samina. She said she’d rather be waterboarded than let her daughter be whitewashed by whites too conservative to spare the extra syllables. Ami never let anyone call...

Damen O’Brien

The coastline’s smile is sharp with blackened teeth,
seabird shelters, scarps, cutaways, broken reefs:
the bloody mouth of a boxer who can’t be dropped,
punch drunk with the brain’s purple pounding . . .