Today’s choice
Previous poems
Patrick Wright
Endings
after the soil exhibition at Somerset House
first i go to finitude while you favour plenitude & birth the source beneath our feet
i recoil at the abject the never-ending cycle of leaves under loam a seedbed for eggs
or spawn this going on & no space for heaven or things to pause or find reprieve
i protest say how when i’m gone i’d like to rest before the choice to return & go through
all this again you sigh as though that’s absurd & endings are just endings we’re mulch
& nothing but endless fucking
mushrooms with your books on toadstools & fairy folk your vision risks nihilism
cells that collide & divide tumours that do whatever they want they too are life
sweet parasites that through a microscope are stellar nurseries solar discs star-stuff
but you insist on star-stuff not just
see a wellspring of microbes microorganisms & minerals go on a rant about mycorrhizae
rhizomes symbolic of a way beyond capitalism
i recall black gold how it began with the wearing of soles that sever us from the cosmos
you gush about mud & marl the morphology of roots how trees are upside down
trees talk to each other like neurones & neurones in tight-knit neighbourhoods
your tears fall over microfauna robbed of enclosures worms in macropores movements
like refugees or the recently evicted
while i’m with muck & the matrix the womb as tomb the putrid metaphysic no room
to resurrect each thorax each springtail’s spark just nodes & networks in the mire
with mould & midden till your arms reach out like tendrils in hope of binding my soul
Patrick Wright’s poems have appeared in Magma, Poetry Ireland, Poetry Wales, The North, and The London Magazine. His debut collection, Full Sight of Her, was published by Eyewear (2020). His second collection, Exit Strategy, was published by Broken Sleep (2025).
Ansuya Patel
Women scrape coins from their purse,
count pennies, one lifts up a watermelon
in mid-air like raising a newborn to light.
Pippa Little
a woman’s rage cannot raise the dead
but it may split stone like lightning
Abiodun Salako
a boy grows tired
of dying again and again.
i am building him a morgue
for Thanksgiving.
Patrick Wright
It’s as if the dream
is telling me we are still joined
somehow, despite waking
and me trudging on, even though
your voicemail is off, your locks
changed.
William Collins
We carry the shame of Paragraph 352D
folded into suitcases at foreign borders,
where love is questioned like a crime,
and disbelief stamped heavier than visas.
They tell us to run for our lives —
but only if we can do it quietly.
Oz Hardwick
The ghost of my mother knows the names of everything, but
she can’t tell me, because ghosts, whatever you have heard
to the contrary, can’t speak.
McLord Selasi
I walk the flat barefoot,
step over old dreams
still curled like cats
in the corners.
Warren Mortimer
& you’ll understand if i leave open this theatre of air
not as the invite for another loss
but to honour their world unwilling to collapse
Jena Woodhouse
Language reinvents itself,
coruscates in signs on walls;
falls silent, mute as clay and stone
on tablets that enshrine its form.