Today’s choice
Previous poems
Nick Cooke
Between the Ears
For Seán Street, in celebration of his 80th birthday
(2nd June 2026)
Molluscous receivers, would that you could
turn your talents inwards, and pick up
all that goes on in the cerebral swamp
that separates you, with its eighty-six
billion neurones, the tiny light-black
entities of which Poirot so often spoke –
along with oodles of (possibly telltale)
fat. ‘I wish you could hear yourself’…
how often have we heard or said this,
forgetting ‘There’s none so deaf’ is the best
of mottoes? – and those myriad neurone-
radars will only work if the lower-sited organ
(on the left-hand side of the thorax)
is disinclined to switch them off,
as it can, dear molluscs, as it does.
Poets applaud the noble ticker ruling
the noggin, but you’ll think otherwise:
the gift of self-audition’s no small feat,
and the heart most times should stick
with its basic bloody business – to beat.
Nick Cooke has had around a hundred poems published or accepted, in a variety of outlets including Acumen, Agenda, The Dark Horse, Ink Sweat & Tears, the High Window Journal and I Am Not A Silent Poet, along with around 40 poetry reviews. In 2016 his poem ‘Tanis’ placed first in a Wax Poetry and Art contest. He was a featured poet on the Flapper Press site in December 2025.
Joseph Blythe
I swear I felt the swirly patterned paper
rip from the walls of my childhood bedroom.
It was the same stained cream shade as my skin –
pockmarked, cut and scabbed, dry and peeling…..
Denise Bundred
Shadowed boats bereft of sail
absorb the surge and slap
constrained by a blue-grey chink
of mooring chains.
Rahma O. Jimoh
A bird skirts across the fence
& I rush to the window
to behold its flapping wings—
It’s been ages
since I last saw a bird.
Samuel A. Adeyemi
I can already hear the chorus of my tribe.
They want the ancient blade,
the guillotine that hovered
above my head like a halo of death.
Mofiyinfoluwa O.
when you
know that your time with someone has almost run out, that is what you do. you look for
tiny things buried in the sand so that you do not have to look at the huge broken thing
standing between you both.
Chris Emery
and if we walk to the same sea later
we’ll see something heaving up beside us:
caskets of grey, white-capped, barren and loose,
the way memories are.
T. N. Kennedy
so you collect those poems which reveal
life at its most intense and solitary
turning them on when you most need to feel
Mariah Whelan
St Ann’s Square Manchester, 23rd May 2017 Because I cannot show you what is at the centre of all this I will lay language up to its edge, walk its edges the way I moved through the back of the crowd too afraid to go in. I had to shade my eyes from...
Marissa Glover
What Might Have Been There is a small white house high on a green hill just south of Scotland, an office bright with books and a window overlooking Magdalene, and somewhere on a dirt road between endless pastures of strong red fescue, is a man on a...