Today’s choice
Previous poems
Claire Harnett-Mann
Common Ground
Behind the block, the night tears in scrub-calls.
Fox kill scores the morning,
ripped by prints in muck.
There’s a form for this, a number to call,
an action plan, a statement
on how the city manages its wild,
what to do when it breaches the scheme.
Rain fingers the concrete.
Walls sweat. Moss thickens on the sills
where pigeons nest.
Doors swell in their frames.
The lift’s out again.
Kids chalk round the mould,
name them death zones.
Someone’s planted potatoes
in a washing-up bowl.
Roots force through the split base,
muscle for the ground below.
This place won’t stay as it’s built.
It shifts, it breaks, gets dragged
to the scrub, to the night calls,
to the unmanaged wild.
Claire Harnett-Mann is a Birmingham-based poet whose work appears in Tears in the Fence and elsewhere. A Nine Arches Press Primers 8 Highly Commended poet, her novella How to Bring Him Back (Fly on the Wall, 2021) was nominated for a Saboteur Award. She can be found on Instagram and Bluesky @clairehmwriter
David Forrest
I don’t know why you bother with poetry Vlad mutters as he adjusts the current in the magnets, forcing them to rhyme with each other.
Neil Fulwood
Today’s operative on the ohrwurm shift
has hacked the WiFi password
in the ear canal and now I’m looping back
endlessly to a misheard lyric . . .
Ira Lightman
Laid down, his upraised face is
White – offputting – on a plumped pillow.
Dave Wynne-Jones
“The all-consuming passion
is rarely found
more than a recipe
for misery,”
you read
Pat Edwards
He appears like a paper bag blown onto the feeder,
punching his beak time and again into the peanuts.
Kate Noakes
If you follow faerie lights
that wisp where boardwalk
becomes trackway, make sure
you’re stocked with milk,
or bread and salt.
Gopal Lahiri
My father stitched an evening with current ripples
spill over rocks and shadows gather at the corner,
Paul Loney
i was standing
very still
my mind
Mai Ishikawa
Taxi I took shelter under a tree, where you also sheltered. You looked at me awkwardly, as if to say Excuse me before shaking your feathers – a tiny droplet landed on my cheek. Suspended, we held each other responsible for the silence. We listened to the...