Today’s choice
Previous poems
Peter Devonald
Father
He is sulphur, he is fire
and brimstone, he is deep
shame, the colour of night,
sound of slamming doors.
He is bitterest regrets,
dark chocolate, olives and kale,
The Telegraph and Magritte’s
pipe, the treachery of images.
Moments replayed on repeat,
light goes on underneath a door,
locking of bedrooms, moss and ivy
on windows, a crack of light, still.
The air sours with acrid shampoo,
turgid reek of cigars and alcohol,
it’s hard to pretend and play at
happy families, rigor mortis grin.
We cling to positives, desperate,
distressed, we do it to ourselves,
you do realise that, don’t you?
Stilted breath sucked from rooms.
Peter Devonald is a multi-award-winning Stockport writer. Winner Broken Spine Readers’ Choice Award 2025, Loft Books Best Poem 2024, Waltham Forest 2022, FofHCS, two HoH’s, runner-up Shelley Memorial and N2tS 2024. Widely-published/anthologised. Forward Prize, two BotN and Children’s Bafta nominated. linktr.ee/pdevonald x.com/petedevonald
Michelle Diaz
Mum was
a raised axe and a party hat.
Alice O’Malley-Woods
i run like a goat
tongue-lolled
Caiti Luckhurst
But first the sun has to break in two
Mara Adamitz Scrupe
on that new broke land I don’t anymore
recall there may have been a tree line or a hedgerow
a grove named & a bird’s sternum
George Sandifer-Smith
Spring 1833 – mists folding their sheets in the fields.
Isaac Roberts feels the turned earth, his father’s
farm an island in the hurtling Milky Way –
Sharon Phillips
Wet tarmac blinks red and gold,
names shine outside the Gaumont.
‘Stop dreaming, you’ll get lost.’
Bill Greenwell
Before the first turn of the key, before
adjusting the mirror, before releasing the handbrake even,
Dad said: there are two things you need to know.
Matt Gilbert
Alive, but not exactly,
as it fills the frame, flicker-lit
by lightning. . .
Rebecca Gethin
This morning
the room is bright with snowlight
and everything seems illuminated differently.