Today’s choice
Previous poems
Tom Blake
After Gaston Bachelard and Sabrina Carpenter
We were the housing and the housed,
meaning nothing except that
we were always occupied,
or to put it simply never out.
After a while we walked like we were on stilts
made from string and sweetcorn tins.
We milled ginger biscuits
in our sheets.
We saw the dream house up in the distance
even when the curtains were closed.
Half the battle was not to doodle crenellations
on those final blueprints.
The house grew so large around us
that I could cat out on the bottom stair
waiting for you to pass over me,
an unmoored tower.
I promise none of this is a metaphor.
Tom Blake is a poet and music journalist who has two chapbooks out with The Red Ceilings Press: Ƨ (2023) and Peach Epoch (2025). His poems have appeared in Anthropocene and Perverse, and he is a regular contributor to KLOF magazine. Insta: tom_blake17
Christtie Jay
My Lord, let the record show
she remembered everyone else
before this. If you must, take her
in teaspoons
May Grier
I wasn’t to know
that it was a three-tusked
beast; that there was not one,
not two, but three
that grew the seed of me.
Daniel Hill
On her first day home, she took
to plucking the sky with tweezers—
latched on to clouds and waited
Sheila Saunders
Which is the subject?
Limp-leaved yucca
reluctantly dying,
the foreground figure
in its stony pot?
Trelawney
What is holding you back from building your wormery?
You can’t say there isn’t the time. Everyone has the time
when it comes to a wormery. Born with the right tools to hand.
David Van-Cauter
…4am and the birdsong begins, a wet January in a new city and I’m alone watching a man in Minnesota, murdered for protecting a woman from a fascist hit squad. . .
Tim Dwyer
Unexpectedly
My neighbour
opens her window
for fresh salty air
Paul Moclair
Their shore leave over,
. . . the spirits of the dead are bid farewell
until that time next year, when ritual
grants them reprieve again.
Susan Elizabeth Hale
Sometimes words are the only thing
that get you through,
But not the words you think,
not a word like love or hope
those are imprecise.