Today’s choice
Previous poems
Andy Humphrey
Cine Reels
On screen, Dad was
the radical –
the introverted
pen-and-notepad kind,
donkey jacket, beard,
betrayed.
Another time
he played a photographer
eyeballing Liverpool –
statutes, pigeons, couples
out to lunch. Thieves
snapped in the act.
Our hometown Hollywood
never had
content warnings.
Murder
came in piano discords,
a hymn swelling to chorus;
death was a one-word
manifesto
crumpled, windblown.
Fin.
On screen,
they killed Dad.
We watched him die
over and over.
Andy Humphrey has published two collections of original poetry, A Long Way to Fall (Lapwing Press, ISBN 978-1-909252-40-0, 2013) and Satires (Stairwell Books, ISBN 978-1-939269-16-4, 2015). He lives in York and works as a solicitor. https://www.writeoutloud.net/profiles/andyhumphrey.
Ben Verinder
Nostalgia as Yogi Bear
Ruminates through you for something tasty,
prizes of the Jellystone mind.
Jane Spray
I’m just an ordinary dryad
not like fancy Eurydice with her sun god father
keep things simple I say I don’t have her dilemmas
Paul Stephenson
The poem of the mask disguises meaning.
The poem of the diet lost seven words.
The poem of the snowman melted.
The poem of the invisible man.
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.