Today’s choice
Previous poems
Hannah Linden
Humanoid
I was cutlery left out in the rain, rusty
by morning, a side-slipping fiddlestick
desperate for music, starved for company.
You were a knockoff BOGOF version
of a briny punk with a commitment phobia
permanently out of your habitat and time zone.
We were observable repairs, reorganised
schedules looking for a fix, butchered
invoices and recriminations.
They were observing aliens, measuring
intonation and feedback loops. And we
let them cut into us because we felt
we owed them for letting us play ‘being
human’. And we were wild and free
as they loaded us into the future machines.
Hannah Linden won Cafe Writers Poetry Competition 2021, Highly Commended Wales Poetry Award 2021 & 2nd prize Leeds Peace Poetry Prize 2024. Her debut pamphlet, The Beautiful Open Sky (V. Press), shortlisted for Saboteur Award 2023. BlueSky: @hannahl1n.bsky.social
Kate Leah Hewett
Sorry, but I’ve stopped
cleaning the windows.
Winifred Mok
Perhaps it’s because
I look like
I’m just passing through
Col Fleetwood
Unmoored on an ocean of heather
no wind to pluck the strings
of the aeolian harp
Amlanjyoti Goswami
Those night boats are back.
Fishermen string their nets
Counting fresh catch.
Brian Kirk
That was the time you caught
the mumps and I was half
afraid I’d catch it too.
Dawn Sands
Walking home from the lecture on Frankenstein
through the November mizzle, small breaths of exhaust
sighing in the twilight headlights, particles of wet air commingling.
Ken Evans
Octopus I am one Like short of being beautiful. Five hundred more Followers, I’m away to fight culture wars. I Block two for lies Quora does not verify. Counter-factuals are ok, there’s simmering wastelands to make out of vague, but someone sent a shroom...
Mary Mulholland
It doesn’t trust paper. It writes itself
in my head where no one can reach it,
laugh, tear it to shreds, or
call it a waste of space, a disgrace.
Afolabi Ezra
It was a quiet day—
no bad news,
no sudden loss,
no reason to hold my breath.