Today’s choice
Previous poems
Anne Symons
Crushed
She was only a little woman
five feet nothing in nylon stockings.
If I stood sideways they’d mark me absent.
Lightweight in her youth
the heaviness came later.
See what you did to me she’d say,
scar stretching red across her belly,
this is where they cut you out.
So when one day she accidentally
trod and broke my napkin ring,
a silver christening gift,
I kept it as it was — distorted.
Anne Symons comes from Cornwall. After a career teaching deaf children and adults Anne began writing poetry in retirement. She completed an MA in Writing Poetry at Newcastle University and the Poetry School in London. Her debut pamphlet Shifting Sands, was published by Littoral Press this year.
Jemma Walsh
Siberian Larkspur Jemma Walsh is an Irish poet based in London. She is currently doing an MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College. Her work has been published in The Irish Times, Moth Magazine, HOWL Magazine, Crossways...
Cormac Culkeen
Stay silent
under eyes of stars
quietly watching,
Rebecca Gethin
I won’t forget her on the beach – fur the colours of sand.
We wouldn’t have spotted her were it not for the jiggle
of her gait, the turn of her head with ears pricked,
the spine’s taut bow and torque of her hocks.
Sarah Hulme
you
stoop
& shell
your self
touch
in gustgasp
Sue Proffitt
You stopped the car in the lane just before our driveway.
I didn’t ask why. Chestnut trees leaned in on either side,
the damp air breathed. You sat there, looking straight ahead
and said there’s nothing worse than being queer.
Arun Jeetoo
This is how it starts.
Champion of every round,
Finlay Worrallo
one for hurting / for loveless / for rinsing yourself off afterwards
and meeting your eye in the bathroom mirror and saying firmly
you have not made a mistake / for a mistake
Sarah Greenwood
Shabby chic my body is a shipwreck blooming with coral I open my legs and out pour gold doubloons it is impossible to slam a door underwater there is an opening here fathoms deep I have made a mast of myself washed up on a beach somewhere once a...
Fiona Sanderson Cartwright
Marianne North transports the tropics to Kew She packs the globe in a wooden box, ships it to London, shrinking each place she visits to the space between her hands then draws them apart like a conjuror nectaring sunbirds out of sable hair, butterfly...