Today’s choice
Previous poems
Peter Daniels
Changes
No, no one is who they think they are,
nor what we think they are, either:
the demon inside is thinking it
and you can’t tell him.
Being lion or crab, how did you imagine
how your life started , what it became,
reinterpreted as a pig,
recast as a snail?
Old man flattered into desire for what
he was, his own self half his age,
look at the change in him, look
at what he wants again.
Make me a new set of cells, give me
a new Russian identity, send me off
with a mission to understand
myself again, my facts.
You want a new self, too. You have
reasons to get into my inside,
and me into yours. You
animal. You angel.
Peter Daniels has published four poetry collections, the latest Old Men (Salt, 2024). He has a Creative Writing PhD from Goldsmiths, has translated Vladislav Khodasévich from Russian (Angel Classics, 2013), and as queer writer in residence at the London Archives wrote the obscene Ballad of Captain Rigby. Website: www.peterdaniels.org.uk
Sally Michaelson
Heads under bonnets
mechanics catch a wiff
of a girl passing
Carmen Marcus
extract from The Keen Is ar scath a Chéile a mhaireann na daoine: It is in the shadow of each other we live. Watching with the dying. Travelling with the dead. Phyllida Anam-Áire; The Celtic Book of Dying, Findhorn Press, Vermont, 2022 Àite...
Nina Parmenter
When The Threat of Hell Failed
God created the lanyard,
Bel Wallace
Month by month I felt my muscles harden
these hefty horns grew from my long skull
Stephen Keeler
Something about arriving somewhere new
just as afternoon is leaving . . .
Geraldine Stoneham
The silence and peace of this place
creeps through on birdsong.
Emma Lee
The instruction invites overthinking:
describe your hometown through
the medium of simple sentences
Vanessa Napolitano
I ask my father to dinner, pretending he is still alive,
ask him what he’d like. He says a pork chop which is not
something I know how to cook.
David Forrest
I don’t know why you bother with poetry Vlad mutters as he adjusts the current in the magnets, forcing them to rhyme with each other.