Today’s choice
Previous poems
Alex Josephy
DayGlo
after Ecclesiasticus 44.1
Let us now praise hi-vis men
who gather together
round a pothole, filling the gap
with their sticky black remedy.
Honour the yellow-gilet WPC
who knows how to listen,
called to a bus stop
just in time by a lost girl.
Let’s not forget Poppy the neon
lollypop operative,
nor the parakeet-bright
sanitary goods delivery crew.
Tell the DayGlo doozers
how they light our mornings,
gleaming waterproof orange
through the gloom.
Let’s almost die for love
of the one at the very top
of a crane at the boatyard,
sketching an arc in the sky
when his lime green forearm,
matchstick-delicate
from down here, tilts
a lever, sends a loaded pallet
swinging out above the jetty,
calms it to a standstill,
winches it down slo-mo, exactly
where it needs to go.
Alex Josephy lives and writes in Sussex and Italy. Her pamphlet Again Behold the Stars, was a Cinnamon Press award winner 2023. Her third full collection, A Little Bridge, was published by Pindrop Press in 2025. www.alexjosephy.net
Tim Dwyer
Shedding Annamakerrig It begins high up the chestnut tree with leaves on the twigs on the tips of branches where sap has slowed. Turning amber carried by the breeze they touch the earth, rest on the grass where autumn begins Tim...
Gopal Lahiri
From this far-side apartment
you watch jarul leaves darkening with the seasons
Adam Kelly
Determined, you smash against the window
I have to admire you in your striped suit
Sandra Noel
The sea happens to me today
not because I’m the woman in the bakers
brusque turned rude
or the peaches still hard in the bowl
Grace Lynn
Sunlight saunters in long, thin wires through the fallow field
of my bedroom. You approach, a migrating heron
in a runny yolk collar and suntanned shorts, a white-light emissary
of hope. . .
Miriam Swales
I’m waiting for news I don’t want to talk about
and scrolling through old photos to escape.
After some swipes, I see you walking away.
Chris Hardy
The night before we left we smoked opium
for the first time and didn’t sleep.
Angela France
Perhaps some small creature fallen
from where it should be. I am unsure
whether I saw it move.
Adam Horovitz
We cannot update you yet, other than to say we are caught
in a doldrums between stations and that your father can wait
as he has been waiting these past two years . . .