Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jane Frank
Wake
The leaves are a colour you’ve never seen
but that I will learn to expect
and there’s a fracas-induced full moon,
clouds beneath like soot
from giant candles.
I woke up and the time ahead was missing
like Notre Dame’s gothic power
and the spots gone from a baby giraffe
born in a zoo in Tennessee.
Today I walked into a gelato-coloured
building and talked about search
engine optimisation, unfamiliar syntax
and the fact that Marcel Proust
wrote a 601-word-long run-on
sentence in In Search of Lost Time
and now I am squeezing the moon like
a stress ball in my fingers as stars fly.
There’s a person-shaped hole
in the centre of me where you ran through,
strings of words like a wake behind you.
Jane Frank is a prize-winning Australian poet, editor and academic. Her most recent collection is Gardening on Mars (Shearsman Books, 2025) and two earlier collections were published by Calanthe Press. Read more of her work at https://www.facebook.com/JaneFrankPoet/
Mark Carson
he dithers round the kitchen, lifts his 12-string from her hook,
strikes a ringing rasgueado, the echo bouncing back
emphatic from the slate flags and off the marble table.
Elizabeth Worthen
This is how (I like to think) it begins:
night-time, August, the Devon cottage, where
the darkness is so complete . . .
Elly Katz
When naked with myself, I feel where a right elbow isn’t, then is. I let my left palm guide me through the exhibition of my body.
Laurence Morris
The night of his arrest I climbed a hill
to find a deep cave in which to hide
Sarp Sozdinler
As a kid, Nehisi used to sleep in a treehouse. He could curl right into it from his bedroom window. He would have a hard time falling asleep every time his parents got loud or physical.
Three poems on Counting for National Poetry Day: Max Wallis, Julie Anne Jenson, Brian Kelly
I don’t wear them
or have any
but you gave me a pair
of seven-inch goth platform heels.
Fizza Abbas
They say change is a constant,
but this constant became a coefficient
always racing to catch me
Scott Elder
What will you do in winter dear when drifts
cover your fingers and shoes
Laura Webb, Edward Alport, and Jaime del Adarve: Day 3 (re)place feature
Tour of the Excavation Collaged from text in the ‘Ice Age to Iron Age’ gallery at the Great North Museum, Newcastle, UK The enigma is why this civilisation became extinct at the same time as a peak in carbon 14, which is a natural element, but in...