Today’s choice

Previous poems

Kit Duke

 

 

 

Photograph, 2008

See the statue: grain flecked
ridged with carvings
the smooth intonations of eyes
set quietly into the face 

            See me: four years old 
            palms to the stone
            and my face tipped slightly forwards
            to kiss the mouth opposite. 
            Our foreheads touch. Even as a child

I knew what love was,
one face fit into the other,
a sort of bracing of the hands
while the bodies found harmony

I didn’t know then,
moving for a mouth  
that refused to yield an inch,
what it wasn’t.

 

Kit Duke is a queer writer and poet based in Stroud, England. He writes a lot about belonging, in all senses of the word. You can find him on Instagram, @kitduke24, or Substack, @kitduke.

Sylvia Banham

Pigeons have invaded the garden, two then four, then a flock.
They roost in the apple tree to nest, reconnoitre or mate
 
ignore my sorties to deter them and shit without stint
on patio and herb bed, foul lovely hyssop and thyme.

Gordon Vells

Impotent in family life and ineffectual at work,
sometimes he would spend a full quarter-hour
just circulating the mini-roundabout on his moped,
dizzy from the power of blocking everyone else.

Patrick Wright

i protest     say how when i’m gone i’d like to rest before the choice to return & go through 
all this again     you sigh as though that’s absurd & endings are just endings     we’re mulch 
& nothing but endless fucking 

Francis de Lima

Oh London. U useless city. Map to

                                                                        nowhere land. Tight stretch 

                                                                        open eye. The underground metal. 

The night tube. The railway. Smog

Over coaltrip. The presence

                                                                          Of machine upon machine. U