Today’s choice
Previous poems
L.B. Jørgensen
Flintinge
When my dad was a boy,
his parents brought him into the fields.
As the whole town picked sugar beets,
their breath hugged
furrows in pre-dawn darkness.
I think of the tug he was taught,
the sound of roots wrested
from the earth
cold in a child’s palms, smeared with dirt.
I’ve felt the swing he learned
to place one gently in the bed
of the tractor.
I imagine the scent of loam,
the sap of sugar sweet on his skin.
L.B. Jørgensen lives in Denmark but writes creatively in English. She has poems published in various magazines such as Magma, The North and Under the Radar. Her pamphlet A Woman Travelling is published by Paekakariki Press.
Alex Josephy
Let us now praise hi-vis men
who gather together
round a pothole, filling the gap
with their sticky black remedy.
Claire Lynn
I lie back, arch my throat,
pretend to relax. Contemplate
ceiling tiles . . .
Peter Daniels
This is not you, but someone soaked in fake Brut
coming at me in a gesture of fake generosity.
Emma Farmer
Your face was on a bus pass,
your hair falling around your face like a curly straw,
pressed in a puddle between the Queen’s old face
and an Aldi receipt for slippers and chicken.
Carson Wolfe
I owned a g-string like this,
the back connected by a rhinestone butterfly.
Starved myself at school to save
my dinner money, bought it from Poundland.
Poetry from Gurmeet Kaur, UEA’s Birch Family Scholar 2025/2026
I kill lines of ant. Heat arrives
in the wrong season. It feels important
to know the names of birds under
the thrum of a flight corridor.
Sarah Nathan
The ash that screams into the night,
the lake that dries, the child amongst the rubble,
the heat, the fire, the lack of books,
Anna Bowles
Akademichna Street
is bombed-out flats, is
the hot-pink Sweet Bakery Café, is
straggly new-planted trees, is
Philip Athans
Never shows up late to a single thing he’s invited to
Always brings the most thoughtful and carefully curated and perfect gift
Never shows up early and never once overstays his welcome
Always appears well groomed and clean and appropriately dressed