Today’s choice
Previous poems
Ansuya Patel
I Cast Out Everything
except this burnt red vase.
Hand shaped in the muffled roar,
devouring flame in the furnace’s mouth.
Sand becomes skin of light.
Its glass body trembles like a sea
animal remembering its salt.
I hold the lagoon’s sigh,
gondolas murmur, emerald waters
flowing along Venetian blue
like mistresses of fire. Its
slender nape of earth
burned to water,
air captured in crystal.
Everything dissolves —
paper, promise, footprint.
But this vase remembers how
light once learned to stand
still.
Ansuya was a joint winner of Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize in 2024. Her debut collection is out with Indigo Dreams Publishing. Her poems have been shortlisted for Bridport, Alpine, Aurora, highly commended at Erbacce. Appeared in Allegro, Artemesia, BlackinWhite, Crowstep, Drawn to the Light, Gypsophila, Ink Sweat and Tears, Rattle and Renard. She can be found on Instagram @ansuya_a_ and online at https://
Peter Bickerton
The gull
on the meadow
taps her little yellow feet
like a shovel-snouted lizard
dancing on a floor of lava
Lydia Harris
ask this place
ask the silver day
the steady horizon
the self-heal the buttercup
the hard fern in the ditch
ask the bee and the tormentil
Seán Street
Dogs in spring park light
pulled by intent wet noses
through luminous grass
Becky Cherriman
What does it wake me to
as sky is hearthed by morning
and my home warms slow?
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.