Today’s choice
Previous poems
Anya Reeve
Walnut
Stubborn, we closed our fists
To better ward away the brume
From inner life, our threads of blood.
The cold an outward skin to glove
A sacred, futured inwardness.
Year’s end will scuff and scrape.
Grey ice, slush. Men worry
The postal; fish is wrapped.
Snow keeps the fewterer;
Passage is trapped.
Hidden is the one bright eye—
Lozenged singularly into bark—
The seed or pip of steadfastness,
The kernel kept against the dark.
Anya Reeve was recently shortlisted for the Philip Hoare Prize for Non-Fiction, 2025. Venues include Tears in the Fence (forthcoming), LINSEED Journal (forthcoming), Snow lit rev, The Rumen, Blumenhaus Magazine, the Modernist Review, the Oxonian Review, Gifts Returned by the River (2025) ed. Iain Sinclair. Website: anyareeve.cargo.site
Clare Morris
Necessity, that scold’s bridle, held her humble and mean,
So that she no longer spoke, just looked –
Her world reduced to a search for special offers . . .
Alison Jones
Mrs Norris had thought ascension
would be whirligig rides in bright violet rays,
as the training books all implied.
Sandra Noel
The tide unpleats from her godet,
zig-zags in running stitch
round the base of the côtil.
Matthew Caley
supposedly: if I am to render
‘a man’ then
this ‘man’ must I guess resemble me‹›
Jenny Robb
The nun in charge of the children is thin, her back straight as punishment.
Ken Evans
You try doing star-jumps, steps,
or squats, in knee-high wellies.
Joe Williams
I was born in a town of shadows.
Anne Symons
She was only a little woman
five feet nothing in nylon stockings.
‘If I stood sideways they’d mark me absent.’
Ben
When she said ‘could’, it was clearly in italics
and when she said ‘one day’, the creak of glaciers
shuddered around its edges.