Today’s choice
Previous poems
Tony D’Arpino
The Bee and the Lemon Tree
like a lover
the bee visits the tree
every day
on the window ledge
the little tree
is sky goddess
the breeze speaks
to the bee-wasp
love circles in the air
the hider
in the lemon leaves
a thought
hums a tune
scent dances
over the kitchen
Tony D’Arpino is an American poet based in Bristol. He is the author of four poetry collections and three pamphlets. His most recent collection is Sky Tree Sky (Alien Buddha Press, 2024), a sequence of poems based on the journals of the Scottish botanist David Douglas. His poems can be found in the Evergreen Review, the Winter Anthology, London Grip, Blackbox Manifold, and Elsewhere Literary Review.
Tim Dwyer
On the pitch of the roof
a jackdaw holds a twig
longer than its wingspan—
do corvids feel pride?
Genna Gardini
go back, small cell, atom
slit by light. It takes up
space, an ocean, a planet, a
Fran Hayden
a friend messaged me:
“every time I see sunflowers,
I think of you”
Betty Doyle
Both cast out to sea, I wonder –
did your ashes ever meet?
It was under the same sun setting,
although years and miles apart.
Mark Rutter
when the people are gone
and the wooden house
has been burned down
to recover its nails
Gráinne Daly
Not for me the tomb of Irish soil.
Put me on a plane
and let me make one last journey
before my final departure.
Rebecca Cohen
If you don’t believe in God, my friend says,
why don’t you eat pork?
Rhian Thomas
On my phone a newsreel shows a car boot lifting
just above the flood. Tail lights like eyes
caught in a comic gasp, while its body, like the carriageway,
lies under sixty million litres of last night’s rain.
Sue Norton
Today I tipped the packet of coffee
into the cafetiere instead of the tin.
Caught myself in time, didn’t pour water in.