Today’s choice
Previous poems
Oenone Thomas
Because I don’t know any other way
I replace my left hand
with a hook, my feet
with jackhammers, both
my eyes with spangled
mirror balls.
I raise my right hand, and
in its palm, I roll another’s
choice of dice. I stud my scalp
with stars, stripe my cheeks
and lips in welts.
I form the phrase how dare you
from hot tacks and nails, I fire it up
into the sky’s great
vacancy. It is no longer
a question.
Oenone Thomas is a writer, child psychotherapist, and chocolatemaker. She was Poet in Residence, Cuckmere Pilgrim Path, 2024/25. Her collection from this adventure, Self-Portrait as Scallop Shell, was published last summer.
Adam Cairns
A buzzard mews, turns in the wind,
a faraway engine grumbles.
Siân Bentham
She doesn’t know what she is doing.
She chops and boils, snacks and sneezes, sits.
Classical radio plays, imbuing
the scene with comic dignity and wit.
J.P. Lancaster
Ivy thrives
despite dependency.
It hangs on, has its other day.
Amy Dugmore
How much water did you have to drink this morning?
Did you sip your coffee without worrying
about its diuretic properties? Was it sunny
where you were?
Hannah Linden
I was cutlery left out in the rain, rusty
by morning, a side-slipping fiddlestick
desperate for music, starved for company.
Eve Chancellor
Imagine waking up one day and discovering
that you are a horse. At first, you might not
believe it and think you are dreaming.
Ananya S Guha
The leaves are growing out of
a harangue of loneliness
palms cupped I listen to silences
of winter or summers
Peter Leight
Instead of Dying I’m Taking a Trip
to Kansas
where the light appears
as if walking through a gate
in the air
Daniel Cartwright-Chaouki
Its timber frame held together by the waste
of its own decay
The rot a kind of glue undisturbed
Cracked panes of glass hold their fractures