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.
Steve Komarnyckyj, Anna Bowles and Lynnda Wardle for Holocaust Memorial Day
where I saw you praying through the angle of the door
Now hangs only in my mind I breathe on its glass wipe away fly specks
Annie Wright
Sing silver times, shimmering columns
of light on the wine-dark, temple
to moon-eyed Hecate, the insatiable.
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
Yucheng Tao
But look here, I turned my head
and discovered the Denver Museum
waiting,
nerve, a soft-boned
species hums
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.
Diane Webster
Squirrels dream of a cougar,
a cougar given permission
to crouch like an assassin
awaiting its prey . . .