Today’s choice
Previous poems
Ansuya Patel
I Cast Out Everything
except this burnt red vase.
Hand shaped in the muffled roar,
devouring flame in the furnace’s mouth.
Sand becomes skin of light.
Its glass body trembles like a sea
animal remembering its salt.
I hold the lagoon’s sigh,
gondolas murmur, emerald waters
flowing along Venetian blue
like mistresses of fire. Its
slender nape of earth
burned to water,
air captured in crystal.
Everything dissolves —
paper, promise, footprint.
But this vase remembers how
light once learned to stand
still.
Ansuya was a joint winner of Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize in 2024. Her debut collection is out with Indigo Dreams Publishing. Her poems have been shortlisted for Bridport, Alpine, Aurora, highly commended at Erbacce. Appeared in Allegro, Artemesia, BlackinWhite, Crowstep, Drawn to the Light, Gypsophila, Ink Sweat and Tears, Rattle and Renard. She can be found on Instagram @ansuya_a_ and online at https://
Dragana Lazici
the days are long but the years are short.
seconds are tiny kitchen knives in my back.
i stopped reading Dickinson, her voice is a sad parrot.
Abigail Ottley
Faces, unless they come swimming up close. are a blur of piggy-pink and ice-
cream. In the street, she doesn’t know, cannot be certain when to smile, when to
look away
Maggie Mackay
The teacher is an old spindly man. Grim, out of a Grimm’s tale. Scarecrow hair, thinning. Unsmiling.
Natasha Gauthier
The tawny clutch appeared
on high-heeled evenings only,
slept in a nest of white tissue.
Romy Morreo
She only speaks to me these days
through groaning floorboards in the night
and slammed doors.
Emma Simon
No-one has seen a ghost while breast-feeding
despite the unearthly hours, the half-light
mad sing-song routines of rocking a child
back to sleep.
Kushal Poddar
The furniture covered in once
transparent now foggy sheets
craft the room a morgue, and we
identity the bodies
Erich von Hungen
And the yellow moths
like some strange throw-away
tissues used up by nature
circle the lamp hanging above.
Helen Frances
I wasn’t in, so she left me a note.
Each word a tangle of broken ends, some oddly linked
to the next with a ghost trail of ink
from her rose-gold marbled fountain pen,
a rare indulgence she’d bought herself.