Today’s choice
Previous poems
Anya Reeve
Walnut
Stubborn, we closed our fists
To better ward away the brume
From inner life, our threads of blood.
The cold an outward skin to glove
A sacred, futured inwardness.
Year’s end will scuff and scrape.
Grey ice, slush. Men worry
The postal; fish is wrapped.
Snow keeps the fewterer;
Passage is trapped.
Hidden is the one bright eye—
Lozenged singularly into bark—
The seed or pip of steadfastness,
The kernel kept against the dark.
Anya Reeve was recently shortlisted for the Philip Hoare Prize for Non-Fiction, 2025. Venues include Tears in the Fence (forthcoming), LINSEED Journal (forthcoming), Snow lit rev, The Rumen, Blumenhaus Magazine, the Modernist Review, the Oxonian Review, Gifts Returned by the River (2025) ed. Iain Sinclair. Website: anyareeve.cargo.site
On the twelfth day of Christmas, we bring you KB Ballentine, J.S. Watts and Terry Dyson
as wind whispers your name.
Summer’s breaking down and a starker calling comes –
leaves saturated with sunset before surrendering.
On the eleventh day of Christmas, we bring you Helen Laycock, Ruth Aylett and Debbie Strange
we will meet again
on the other side
On the tenth day of Christmas, we bring you Jenny McRobert, Angela Topping and Maria C. McCarthy
The tree makes its way into the garden
looms at the window, a disconsolate ghost
On the ninth day of Christmas, we bring you Caroline Smith, Bec Mackenzie and David Keyworth
After the lunch he gets his folder
of Christmas games.
On the eighth day of Christmas, we bring you Em Gray, Abigail Ottley and Emma Simon
And now you’re half a spin of the world away,
somewhere I’ve never been, like Narnia . . .
On the seventh day of Christmas, we bring you Sue Burge, Erica Hesketh and Max Wallis
Once there was nothing sweeter than snow
On the sixth day of Christmas, we bring you Amy Rafferty, Tim Kiely and D.A.Prince
We pick up where you left off, searching still,
choosing random cards from a dealer’s deck:
twenty-one crows in a night-time tree,
deep within the dark, with all that chatter
On the fifth day of Christmas, we bring you Paul McGrane, Kevin Reid and Helen Evans
As regular as Santa Claus, she’d call
around at Christmas, the next-door neighbour
and my Sunday school teacher, Mrs Williams.
On the fourth day of Christmas, we bring you Leusa Lloyd, Lydia Benson and Charlotte Johnson
It is always Christmas in the loft