Today’s choice
Previous poems
Colin Pink
Thorny (One Sided Conversations No4)
after seeing Akram Khan’s Giselle 18 Jan 2026
to embrace you is like clasping
a fist full of briars
if your mouth was an envelope
I’d lick it shut
you can push all you like against
the wall between
the living and the dead
but it won’t give
yet I hunger still
cannot forget the taste of you
your honeysuckle heart
is held in my grasp
and there is nowhere on earth
to put it down
Colin Pink co-chairs the Barnes & Chiswick poetry stanza. His books of poems are: Acrobats of Sound (2016), The Ventriloquist Dummy’s Lament (2019), Typicity (2021) and Wreck of the Jeanne Gougy (2021).
Rob A. Mackenzie
Everything is moving. I have to remind myself
it’s a flat canvas and behind it a wall that’s solid
as I am.
Melanie Branton
A vixen or a reason. A
rave. No air, no sex, nor
Charlotte Oliver
On a bench outside Next,
a punctured woman
traces circles in the air with
a pale finger
Peter Devonald
He is bitterest regrets,
dark chocolate, olives and kale,
The Telegraph and Magritte’s
pipe, the treachery of images.
Anne Ryland
Restless two-hundred-year-old village elder,
a ragged playground of words, or is it weeds –
fragments of chant to slaps of skipping rope.
Colin Dardis
I have never climbed a tree,
never broken a bone
and will never walk on water.
May Garner
The house keeps score
in places no one checks any longer.
Sally Spiers
Night’s white noise is over. Day arises
to stillness. Light crouches behind windows
Tim Brookes
In the charity shop I try on a coat
flocked with fake shearling,
shaved-soft almost: fibres
fired onto plastic to fool the wrist.