Today’s choice

Previous poems

Julian Dobson

 
 
 
The city asleep

Street after street, ears bright to bass and tune
of two thudding feet, gradients of breathing. But rain

is brooding. Sparse headlights, ambient drone
of cars kissing tarmac, merging — but rain

twists senses, fractures distance, unzips
fences, chimneys, scaffolding. Everything but rain

rippled, colours drained: silhouetted pines,
apple trees in a park, a glowing cigarette butt. Rain

creeps in, up, around, so it never feels like drowning,
it’s sleepier. You hardly flinch from its cling. But rain’s

a key to endless life, infinities of drenching.
The first thrush knifes the dawn, its song

        nothing but rain.

 
 
Julian Dobson has poems in a wide range of journals, including The Rialto, Stand, Acumen and Ink, Sweat & Tears. Julian lives in Sheffield and can be found on Bluesky at @juliandobson.bsky.social

Damon Hubbs

How a Plastic Bag in an Elm Tree on Winter St. Learned to Mimic the Moon

It’s growing in what was once the tree
with the great green room.
It’s singing in yogurt
and fluttering like an amorphous pearl
of necrosis.

Cindy Botha

what shows up at dusk
 
moths of course, pale parings―
filmy, restless
dark swarf of birds homeflitting
to perch-trees
sometimes a hedgehog
nosing leaflitter
an owl wooing from the pines

Vic Pickup

Operation Alphaman

It took a great effort and I had to bite hard on the stick
to push the subcostal muscles aside.
The skin had parted easily under my knife,
though keeping the blood at bay with no one to swab the wound
was difficult. This was remedied with a vacuum cleaner

Julian Brasington

When one has lived a long time alone
and not alone your time become
someone’s history and you have grown
tired of yet another war and the world
has it in for you simply for being