Today’s choice
Previous poems
Kate Bailey
Us and Them
They’ve mended the park fence again,
patched it over with the usual ugly metalwork,
like a riot barricade.
That’ll keep them out –
the delinquents,
the ne’er-do-wells,
who break in and sit on the grass in the dark
and watch the moon,
the dirty buggers!
Next week it will be prised away
to leave a gap the width of a person.
Another incursion.
And those scum-of-the-earth
lying under softly budding trees,
counting the stars.
Kate Bailey is a violinist, but she has always loved words. She has two grown-up daughters, and lives in Oxford with her husband and pacifist cat. Her writing has been published in the Frogmore Papers and the Fish anthology.
Jacob Burgess Rollo
Jacob Burgess Rollo is a poet and prose writer based in Dorset, his work is featured in From the Lighthouse and Avant Cardigan, a zine he founded with friends. He has an English Literature BA from Durham and is going on to study for a master's in...
Dilys Wyndham Thomas
we walk through the exhibition hall lost
amongst water-logged bones, a sunk haul lost
Ruth Lexton
It is late at night and the kettle is boiling,
a quire of steam fanning out in the white kitchen
you are holding me as if I were your girl again
Stewart Carswell
It’s the house at the end.
White paint flakes off the front gate,
wood rots beneath.
Chris Kinsey
Hey cat, you’re doing really well,
three fields stalked and only one to go.
Holly Magill
. . .you’re swallowed whole
into this cocoon: pine-scent, antibac and the dry
whoosh of his heater – lean your careworn bones into
synthetic leather snug, . . .
Dave Simmons
My sky is a hole from which the bucket drops.
Like all heretics, I am put to work processing stones.
Paul Fenn
To impress you, I became
a seven-year-old son of Sparta.
A little hard man, crayon
marching down the page.
Ruth Aylett
God had been playing computer games
for a chunk of eternity when he became aware
he’d left creation in the oven for a long time