Today’s choice
Previous poems
Kit Duke
Photograph, 2008
See the statue: grain flecked
ridged with carvings
the smooth intonations of eyes
set quietly into the face
See me: four years old
palms to the stone
and my face tipped slightly forwards
to kiss the mouth opposite.
Our foreheads touch. Even as a child
I knew what love was,
one face fit into the other,
a sort of bracing of the hands
while the bodies found harmony
I didn’t know then,
moving for a mouth
that refused to yield an inch,
what it wasn’t.
Kit Duke is a queer writer and poet based in Stroud, England. He writes a lot about belonging, in all senses of the word. You can find him on Instagram, @kitduke24, or Substack, @kitduke.
Francis de Lima
Oh London. U useless city. Map to
nowhere land. Tight stretch
open eye. The underground metal.
The night tube. The railway. Smog
Over coaltrip. The presence
Of machine upon machine. U
Miriam Swales
When I was 12, I knew the weight of a human head.
8 Heads in a Duffel Bag (a bit of dark comedy).
It grew from there. The curiosity. The calculations.
Alison Pritchard
By what rough science
were you given
this migraine of a name
Matt Gilbert
Disgust springs up from the guts
to meet a sprinting lump
of furry muscle.
Kathleen Bryson
I am the dreaming herpetogaster chimera and
I am part-and-parcel of the impossible animals project.
Scott Lilley
I’ve seen dozens of you about the Fylde,
face all vape, fatigue, some wild sense of
beard, black hair to border it all.
Rich Yates
The bird
crept up on him, threw its voice into an empty tree
Annie Kissack
Girl Awaits the Psychic Investigators They’re late. The table is laid with a clean cloth, all normal and neat. Our visitors, city men, may find it hard to navigate the path but we can wait. They hope to gather evidence of a haunting; whether he’ll...
Jim Murdoch
We don’t decide who we love.
Who we hate, yes,
who we’re jealous of,
but never who we end up loving.
