Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jena Woodhouse
Granules in the Hourglass
Syllables cascade through time,
granules in an hourglass,
to recombine, cohere into
a word, a phrase, poetic line.
Language reinvents itself,
coruscates in signs on walls;
falls silent, mute as clay and stone
on tablets that enshrine its form.
We think we make our language sing:
our mother tongue gave us the song;
we, too, are particles of time,
free-falling; crucibles of mind.
Jena Woodhouse‘s unpublished poetry collection, Tidings from the Pelagos: a Polyphony was shortlisted in the Greek-based Eyelands International Book Awards 2024. Her forthcoming collection is The Singing Ship: a Study in Resistances, to be published by Calanthe Press, November 2025. She lived and worked for a decade in Greece, and has spent time in many other countries of Eastern and Western Europe.
Royal Rhodes
Halfway within
the sheltering woods
you found yourself.
Claire Walker
we are holding each other so we don’t forget
the way water holds us.
Sue Spiers and Mike Huett for Day Three of our Archive Feature
You will need four hundred items in the stew of her:
cumin, lemon, colocynth, bitter apple, lime, broccoli
to get the aftertaste she would want in your memory.
– Sue Spiers
It took years to piece events
together; hushed voices, evasions,
or little glances…
– Mike Huett
Zeeshan Choudhury and Emma Lara Jones for Day Two of our Archive Feature
Took my pain, buried it in buttercream.
Unboxed, licked off the top, Masticated
each grain into saline, let my bloodstream
drip-feed membranes their acid-fat. In bed,
-Zeeshan Choudhury
consists of tiny pink erasers,
safety pins, shirt buttons and the odd
butterfly clip.
-Emma Lara Jones
Mymona Bibi for Day One of our Archive Feature
corners folded
edges worn.
where girls in
the night’s meski
giggle in secret
hair in tangles.
Catherine O’Brien
When all is quiet save for the silky rustling of an autumn breeze
let that love show.
When your patience is darkness-dappled and as weary as an exhausted scholar
let that love show.
Marianne Habeshaw
session in the woods. Someone took a feather
to the hairdressers. Gum cross-sectioned
my cheek; he forgot about removal to kiss.
Had to avoid tree roots, placed us on green.
He mentioned his bullied niece kept reaching
for her blanket; Mr. Smith is quaking regression,
Fergal O’Dwyer
but sunlight streaming in
through impractically curtainless windows;
my skin, made-up in golden light,
looking taught from affluence
and vitamins.
Like they do in films,
Hattie Graham
wait for the witch who comes to pick wild garlic.
Together we can be brave and
pull the green bits from her teeth.
Wandering the glen with
nothing in our pockets, we can search
for the place where fairies still live.
No one will find us there,
not even the old grey bell they ring at tea time.