Today’s choice
Previous poems
Peter Daniels
Changes
No, no one is who they think they are,
nor what we think they are, either:
the demon inside is thinking it
and you can’t tell him.
Being lion or crab, how did you imagine
how your life started , what it became,
reinterpreted as a pig,
recast as a snail?
Old man flattered into desire for what
he was, his own self half his age,
look at the change in him, look
at what he wants again.
Make me a new set of cells, give me
a new Russian identity, send me off
with a mission to understand
myself again, my facts.
You want a new self, too. You have
reasons to get into my inside,
and me into yours. You
animal. You angel.
Peter Daniels has published four poetry collections, the latest Old Men (Salt, 2024). He has a Creative Writing PhD from Goldsmiths, has translated Vladislav Khodasévich from Russian (Angel Classics, 2013), and as queer writer in residence at the London Archives wrote the obscene Ballad of Captain Rigby. Website: www.peterdaniels.org.uk
Clare Bryden
how do I begin?
Yvonne Baker
an etherial whiteness
that covers and disguises
as a strip of white frosted glass
Hilary Thompson
Ambling up North Street
on a Saturday afternoon
at the end of a long Winter,
I am stopped by two women
Irene Cunningham
Lavender seeps. I expect my limbs to leaden, lead the body down through sheet, mattress-cover, into the machinery of sleep where other lives exist.
Graham Clifford
The Still Face Experiment
You must have seen that Youtube clip
where a mother lets her face go dead.
Her toddler carries on burbling for twenty to thirty seconds until she realises there is nothing coming back to her.
Susan Jane Sims
After you died,
someone asked:
What was it like
in those final sixteen days
waiting for your son to die?
Jane Frank
I imagine returning to the house.
Furniture is piled up in the rain—
the ideas that won’t fit.
Ilias Tsagas
I used to dial your number to hear your voice. I would hold the receiver for a long time as if your voice was trapped inside . . .
Jim Paterson
Shove it, that farewell
and the sky shimmering with frost
and the waves wrecking on the shore