Today’s choice
Previous poems
Tom Blake
After Gaston Bachelard and Sabrina Carpenter
We were the housing and the housed,
meaning nothing except that
we were always occupied,
or to put it simply never out.
After a while we walked like we were on stilts
made from string and sweetcorn tins.
We milled ginger biscuits
in our sheets.
We saw the dream house up in the distance
even when the curtains were closed.
Half the battle was not to doodle crenellations
on those final blueprints.
The house grew so large around us
that I could cat out on the bottom stair
waiting for you to pass over me,
an unmoored tower.
I promise none of this is a metaphor.
Tom Blake is a poet and music journalist who has two chapbooks out with The Red Ceilings Press: Ƨ (2023) and Peach Epoch (2025). His poems have appeared in Anthropocene and Perverse, and he is a regular contributor to KLOF magazine. Insta: tom_blake17
Mohsen Hosseinkhani translated by Tahereh Forsat Safai
Men are the color of soil
Women are sitting on the ashes
Stephen Komarnyckyj
you are the shadow slipping through the mirror
Jo Farrant
We’re stuck on a scene, frozen, like the ice cubes I begged Mum to get with the little flowers in them. Like taking a test in the school gym but your knees are so big they’re banging into the desk.
Douglas K Currier
Afternoon hangs in the air, and the birds leave.
Frogs begin to talk to each other, and the heat congeals.
Stephen Chappell
If you could call that friend,
the special one,
the one you always love and know loves you
Marius Grose
Until the dead, sucked from leaf mould graves
are rising in forest sap, to make connections
inside strange green brains
Andrew Keyman
a day later you’re in l.a. picking out cars with the magic
only money can buy
Chrissy Banks
So many times I walked
head down half asleep
along that ordinary road to school
Christopher M James
She’d had the two of us, had learnt
how children bury their riddles, how love
unearths them