Today’s choice
Previous poems
Hannah Linden
Humanoid
I was cutlery left out in the rain, rusty
by morning, a side-slipping fiddlestick
desperate for music, starved for company.
You were a knockoff BOGOF version
of a briny punk with a commitment phobia
permanently out of your habitat and time zone.
We were observable repairs, reorganised
schedules looking for a fix, butchered
invoices and recriminations.
They were observing aliens, measuring
intonation and feedback loops. And we
let them cut into us because we felt
we owed them for letting us play ‘being
human’. And we were wild and free
as they loaded us into the future machines.
Hannah Linden won Cafe Writers Poetry Competition 2021, Highly Commended Wales Poetry Award 2021 & 2nd prize Leeds Peace Poetry Prize 2024. Her debut pamphlet, The Beautiful Open Sky (V. Press), shortlisted for Saboteur Award 2023. BlueSky: @hannahl1n.bsky.social
Paul Bavister
We found our eyes first,
as they swirled through fragments
of black jumper, dark pine trees
and an orange sunset sky
Anne Donnellan
I prayed for resurrection
that the sun in the sky
might dance Easter morning.
Philip Gross
Enough of scorch, scald, sore- and rawness.
Sometimes flesh longs for eclipse.
Nick Allen
she told me about the still hours
spent at the coast watching the east
Phil Vernon
Because we were four
and I only had strength to carry one
and knew no other way
I carried the one who called out loudest;
threatened us most.
Patrick Deeley
As you rummage of a morning
among dust-furred personal effects
jumbled in an old
wooden suitcase under a bed . . .
Terry Jones
The Lake District Tourist Board
has had no input into what
you are now reading, but I so
miss Cumbria in Holy Week
Mary Mulholland
Who will pick the apples now she’s gone?
Samantha Carr
She has few secrets with her translucent map skin of blue underground rivers visible to scale.