Today’s choice
Previous poems
Sarah Boyd
Finely balanced
He’s a house of cards, a delicately balanced pyramid
held together by hearing aids and dusty bifocals and
wobbling dentures and ageing pacemaker and
shirt with three buttons missing in action and
tea-stained cardigan with more holes than wool and
21st birthday watch that never stops ticking and
hernia truss and extra large incontinence pants and
braces and belt to support saggy-kneed trousers and
over-stretched socks and ulcer bandage and
triple-E shoes with Velcro straps
and
one trip on the rug he’s been told to throw
in the dustbin, a mix-up with his meds, one jug of
water not touched all day, or one ill-judged lunge
for the walking frame, and the whole lot
will come crashing down on the floral patterned,
wall-to-wall Axminster.
Sarah Boyd is a student on the MA Writing Poetry run by Poetry School and Newcastle University. Her poems have appeared in Frogmore Papers, Dreich, The Cannon’s Mouth and elsewhere. She came second in the 2025 Arts Richmond Poetry Prize.
Peter Wallis
Dead in a chest,
are folded matinee jackets, bonnets, bootees and mitts.
Tissue sighs like the sea at Lowestoft,
always Third week in August
Amanda Bell
We clipped a window through the currant, sat on folding chairs with keep-cups,
wrapped in blankets as we yelled through the prescribed two-metre gap.
Then took to mending – darning socks and patching favourite denims
Anna Maughan
Illness had left me
brittle as frost, icicle-thin
swaddled in borrowed warmth
Angeliki Ampelogianni
on marble tiles bird like
I am a pin measuring drops in the toilet bowl
A W Earl
Doors
My parents’ house became a place of closed white doors,
where sound hung spare and echoes found no junk
or clutter to rest themselves upon.
Finola Scott
Winter dusk soughs in, dark
clouds threaten, tangle her wool.
Huw Gwynn-Jones
Black is the colour inside black light on
blackened brick and slats
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.