Today’s choice
Previous poems
Col Fleetwood
Muckle Flugga
Unmoored on an ocean of heather
no wind to pluck the strings
of the aeolian harp
Policed by the unsettling glare
of nesting great skuas
we tread the narrow path
The boardwalk rises and falls
under a sky empty
and scoured of song
To the lighthouse
in search of the solan goose
we press on
Until all land ends
pearl-studded cliffs rear up
to arrest us
And the pitch of the sea
snares the unquiet silence
of our voices
Col Fleetwood lives and writes in the wild and beautiful borderlands between Scotland and England.
Elena Chamberlain
My trans friends and I just want to go swimming
in cold water
without a thousand eyes watching.
Regina Weinert
It was the snatch of a dream,
someone said this is not
what you do in the desert,
it was one precise thing, not a list . . .
Philip Dunkerley
We leave early, drive for two and a half hours,
park, find the church where you were married.
Marc Janssen
The sky opens
Blinking its single slackened eye.
Sigune Schnabel tr. Simon Lèbe
She cut letters out of me,
which quietly and unnoticed
danced red poems.
Pat Edwards
He is in white-out, stopped in his tracks,
dying for the comfort of a fag.
He makes a chalice around the flame,
hands becoming shield so he can light up.
Pamilerin Jacob
Annette the gap-toothed,
You kissed a man & I was born. You gave him
your laughter & he built an empire,
Fatihah Quadri Eniola
There is an album of all the men
your mother have loved. It sits every
night in the deep silence of the
basement.
Nathan Evans
If they ask where I am, tell them: I am
wintering. I have secreted small acorns
of sadness in crevices of gnarled limbs
and shall be savouring their bitternesses
on the back of my tongue until the days
lengthen.