Today’s choice
Previous poems
Gareth Writer-Davies
In the Dales
after John Ashbery
it’s a special kind of empty
the footed earth, saluting the sky
so much to see
I took a photograph of you
posed in the window seat
punchy red slippers
blurring rock and field
the same window in five years?
jenny wren says yes, the crows caw no
what do they know
as days go by
certain details are already hazy
and new succeeds new
as we spread over the vast stone barns
of Swale and Wensley
and there we are, older certainly
walking to the monument
where there is no monument
the upper left corner of the sky
a history of what might have been
Gareth Writer-Davies: Hawthornden Fellow (2019). Shortlisted for the Bridport Prize (2014 and 2017) and the Erbacce Prize (2014). Commended in the Prole Laureate Competition (2015) and Prole Laureate for 2017. Commended in the Welsh Poetry Competition (2015) and Highly Commended in 2011. His pamphlet Bodies was published in 2015 followed by Cry Baby in 2017, The Lover’s Pinch in 2018, The End in 2019 and Wysg in 2022.
Shamik Banerjee
Much like a burnt-out farmer flumping down
upon his ache-allaying, tender bed
Rose Lennard
Each year we climbed to that place high above the ruins.
Melanie Tibbs
People came to find out what ‘Garage Sale’ meant
in a small village landlocked county early burning comet tail
of Thatcher’s Britain.
Alfie Nawaid
a cowboy is that split second of doubt between victim
and victor, quick whipcrack out the corner of the mouth,
Stuart Rawlinson
I’m nineteen, I’m ancient.
I am so hungover
one of my eyes has fallen out…
Susie Wilson
Ceilings don’t hold water well.
Burst a pipe at the top
of an apartment block
to test this theory, if you will.
Andy Breckenridge
Abertawe After Richard Siken For CHD Tell me about the time I mansplained that Swansea is the English for Abertawe and means town at the mouth of the River Tawe. And about when, from the hill above Rhossili beach Lundy Island’s spectral mass...
Mark Wyatt
Daedalus
Plato loved his incessant questioning
of the natural world’s engineering
Sue Wallace-Shaddad
I tempt you with morsels
of soft-skinned peach, a pear sliced
in quarters, pipless and skinless.