Today’s choice
Previous poems
Julie Sheridan
Love Birds
Agapornis
They married in a chapel of black steel
bars, tethered up their feathers to serve as
stained glass. One year in and their chirrups are still
hymeneal. Humans can’t help but pass
by and beam at this pair, bonded for life.
All day long they practice their craft, the dry
squelching sound of vows, the wings of the wife
splaying to blue as if to an actual sky.
Look, they’re at it again. He heaves up seed
to feed her, to prove his paternal credentials,
she swallows and hatches the clutch. What need
isn’t met in this cage, in this unfledged embrace?
All day long that muffling sound, the heel
of a hand kneading the palm of another.
Julie Sheridan lives in Barcelona. Her work has appeared in journals including Poetry Ireland Review, Mslexia, Poetry Scotland, Dream Catcher, The Ekphrastic Review and Anthropocene. She was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize in both 2023 and 2024.
Michael Shann
Early March, after weeks of rain:
between a young oak’s leggy roots,
a cushion of dun, desiccated leaves.
Darren Deeks
You have been burgled.
While you were out with the dog,
a burglar made best use of that
yawning kitchen keyhole to spook
through tracelessly
Rachel Lewis
I step through missing bricks.
Green graves cluster
on a rise under a yew…
Kexin Huang
She came growling at me like a wolf,
muttering moonlight out of her throat
Joe Crocker
Hold a rule beside her measured look.
Precisely fix the time it took
to meet and break away.
David Adger
being unnatural
he fixes his sight past the fields
of bere and oat and the woods
of birch, his goat-eyes watch
two worlds at once
NJ Hynes
It was so quiet she could hear her hair grow,
heartbeat stretch across measures, nails twist
into mobius strips . . .
Steph Morris
from another picture swiped a nice cyan
tore the lemon horrors off it
and slapped it straight
in this picture . . .
Amlanjyoti Goswami
In one of those colourful stalls
A gentle man with golden fingers
Carves a wheelbarrow from broken wood