Today’s choice
Previous poems
Sarah Boyd
Finely balanced
He’s a house of cards, a delicately balanced pyramid
held together by hearing aids and dusty bifocals and
wobbling dentures and ageing pacemaker and
shirt with three buttons missing in action and
tea-stained cardigan with more holes than wool and
21st birthday watch that never stops ticking and
hernia truss and extra large incontinence pants and
braces and belt to support saggy-kneed trousers and
over-stretched socks and ulcer bandage and
triple-E shoes with Velcro straps
and
one trip on the rug he’s been told to throw
in the dustbin, a mix-up with his meds, one jug of
water not touched all day, or one ill-judged lunge
for the walking frame, and the whole lot
will come crashing down on the floral patterned,
wall-to-wall Axminster.
Sarah Boyd is a student on the MA Writing Poetry run by Poetry School and Newcastle University. Her poems have appeared in Frogmore Papers, Dreich, The Cannon’s Mouth and elsewhere. She came second in the 2025 Arts Richmond Poetry Prize.
Ira Lightman
Laid down, his upraised face is
White – offputting – on a plumped pillow.
Dave Wynne-Jones
“The all-consuming passion
is rarely found
more than a recipe
for misery,”
you read
Pat Edwards
He appears like a paper bag blown onto the feeder,
punching his beak time and again into the peanuts.
Kate Noakes
If you follow faerie lights
that wisp where boardwalk
becomes trackway, make sure
you’re stocked with milk,
or bread and salt.
Gopal Lahiri
My father stitched an evening with current ripples
spill over rocks and shadows gather at the corner,
Paul Loney
i was standing
very still
my mind
Mai Ishikawa
Taxi I took shelter under a tree, where you also sheltered. You looked at me awkwardly, as if to say Excuse me before shaking your feathers – a tiny droplet landed on my cheek. Suspended, we held each other responsible for the silence. We listened to the...
Lue Mac
Sad how things expire before you work out
what they mean. Like earlier I was noticing
the rose petals on the path, all damp and slick,
Alice O’Malley-Woods
For the Peregrines of Offham Chalk Pit The quarry holds your eyrie like a grateful palm. You - indelicate gobber all gape and gum-pink circled in the beach white like a mouth stuck in wonder. O spit-shrieker coming back for yourself, tearing fur so diligently, never...