Today’s choice
Previous poems
Rushika Wick
quiet
slid in bass-drop dams up
pierced ears, furred
with youth, his vest drinks sweat,
high-tops, Moog-loop
domed cap punctured
with embroidery, brailled
ethnographic record, reverb
haze of brisk lavender, wire mesh
trash of the park, sun-burnt song,
something about the power
of gaze, arc of hand to the ring’s
negative space – astrological
movement in the ecology of court,
echo, orb, limbs
stirring over him inter
a pattern. pattern up – this belonging
this world, the bounce
the squeak, hot bodies on bail
from sentences of looming
adulthood, the classroom
the death of a father
Rushika Wick is a writer, editor and paediatrician. Her first collection Afterlife As Trash (Verve 2021) was highly commended in the Forwards. She is interested in the poetics of witness, infections and cyborg identities and co-edited the Disease Anthology published by Carnaval Press in 2022. Rushika currently holds a scholarship at the Poetry School x Newcastle University MA in writing poetry.
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.
Lesley Burt
Red-hot-pokers blazon her two world wars in flowerbeds, and in her hearth. The coalman drops odd nuggets under gaslight for neighbours to fetch in a bucket.
From the Archives: Dipo Baruwa-Etti
Seats
Before a table of white
People, I stand with ballet
Slippers strapped/soft soles
Head pointed towards the angels…
Ian Harker
The first night you lay down your head in London
there is hawthorne between your sheets.