Today’s choice
Previous poems
Charlotte Oliver
Repeat
On a bench outside Next,
a punctured woman
traces circles in the air with
a pale finger
while her thoughts leak out
in a rill of mutterings.
Nobody sees her
in the busy emptiness
of lunchtime. Inside
my pocket
two small shells – they
are chalky, finely ridged.
I feel the edge of their curve
over and over
like a chant.
In the car park
the ticket machine says,
Change is possible.
Charlotte Oliver writes for adults and children. A New Northern Poet (2023), she is one of The Poetry Society’s Poets in Schools. Her first full collection My Hands Are Still Just Petals is forthcoming with Valley Press in Oct. 2026.
Brian Kirk
The train is the way,
the tracks a scar cut
deep in the land
you can’t help but touch.
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. . .