Today’s choice

Previous poems

Anya Reeve

 

 

 

Walnut

Stubborn, we closed our fists
To better ward away the brume
From inner life, our threads of blood.
The cold an outward skin to glove
A sacred, futured inwardness.
Year’s end will scuff and scrape.
Grey ice, slush. Men worry
The postal; fish is wrapped.
Snow keeps the fewterer;
Passage is trapped.
Hidden is the one bright eye—
Lozenged singularly into bark—
The seed or pip of steadfastness,
The kernel kept against the dark.

 

 

Anya Reeve was recently shortlisted for the Philip Hoare Prize for Non-Fiction, 2025. Venues include Tears in the Fence (forthcoming), LINSEED Journal (forthcoming), Snow lit rev, The Rumen, Blumenhaus Magazine, the Modernist Review, the Oxonian Review, Gifts Returned by the River (2025) ed. Iain Sinclair. Website: anyareeve.cargo.site

Gary Akroyde

We searched for it

through the tarmac in every rain-bruised sky
in dark Pennine shadows where great mills

spewed out ringlets of ghost-grey fog

Nathan Curnow

I like to think it’s a story about himself and Einstein
floating in zero gravity, Albert sailing through the capsule
toward his drifting pipe, Brian playing We Will Rock You—

Ash Bowden

Out again with the pitchfork churning 
compost into the old green bin, stinking
and silent as an ancient earthen vat.

Mallika Bhaumik

This is not a frilly, mushy love letter 
to a city whose allure lies in defying all labels and holding the mystery key to a man’s heart, though none has ever been able to lay an absolute claim on it,