Today’s choice
Previous poems
Sarah Boyd
Finely balanced
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
tea-stained cardigan with more holes than wool and
21st birthday watch that never stops ticking and
hernia truss and extra large incontinence pants and
braces and belt to support saggy-kneed trousers and
over-stretched socks and ulcer bandage and
triple-E shoes with Velcro straps
and
one trip on the rug he’s been told to throw
in the dustbin, a mix-up with his meds, one jug of
water not touched all day, or one ill-judged lunge
for the walking frame, and the whole lot
will come crashing down on the floral patterned,
wall-to-wall Axminster.
Sarah Boyd is a student on the MA Writing Poetry run by Poetry School and Newcastle University. Her poems have appeared in Frogmore Papers, Dreich, The Cannon’s Mouth and elsewhere. She came second in the 2025 Arts Richmond Poetry Prize.
On the First Day of Christmas we bring you Sarah Mnatzaganian, Rebecca Gethin, Jenni Thorne
Towards the Solstice
owls fly closer in December twilight,
call to each other across the garden.
Martin Fisher
Inside, in the half-light, the iron rot took hold.
Forgotten service–obsolete.
Salt-coin neglect.
The money flowed inland,
Moored on an hourglass choke.
No one told the sea.
Craig Dobson
Out of morning
a misted light,
glowing fire
in the air.
Steven Taylor
A very long time ago
Stephen Fry’s godfather, the
Justice, Sir Oliver Popplewell
Who chaired the inquiry
Into the Bradford City
Amirah Al Wassif
Beneath my armpit lives a Sinbad the size of a thumb.
His imagination feeds through an umbilical cord tied to my womb.
Now and then, people hear him speaking through a giant microphone—
Singing,
Cracking jokes,
Mark Smith
In the portacabin that morning, men smoked
and looked at last week’s paper again.
There was no water to fill the urn.
The first job – to get connected
Toby Cotton
A blustery day –
the wind too strong for kites
or for lifts to the sky.
“To a thoughtful spot,” it cites
and pins me to the earth.
Ansuya Patel
except this burnt red vase.
Hand shaped in the muffled roar,
devouring flame in the furnace’s mouth.
Hannah Ward
Look, Drew, the
plums are in
pieces beneath
us. I dreamt: