Today’s choice
Previous poems
Paul Stephenson
Attraction
Like one of those horses
on the carousel
going round and round in circles
sliding up and down a pole
for three minutes
then stopping a while
then starting again
for three minutes
sliding up and down a pole
in circles going round and round
on the carousel
like one of those horses
going round and round in circles
sliding up and down a pole
for three minutes
then stopping a while
then starting again
for three minutes
sliding up and down a pole
in circles going round and round
on the carousel
like one of those horses
Paul Stephenson’s debut collection is Hard Drive (Carcanet, 2023), shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award and Polari Book Prize. His last pamphlet was Selfie with Waterlilies (Paper Swans Press, 2017). He recently co-edited the ‘Ownership’ (92) issue of Magma Poetry and helps programme Poetry in Aldeburgh. Website: paulstep.com
Philip Rush
Tom’s advice, mind you,
was to drink hot chocolate
last thing at night
on a garden bench
beneath the moon.
Rosie Jackson
Today, I talked with a friend about death
and what it means to have arrived in my life
before I have to leave it . . .
Mariam Saidan
they said sing in private,
Zan shouldn’t sing.
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 –