Today’s choice
Previous poems
Tom Blake
After Gaston Bachelard and Sabrina Carpenter
We were the housing and the housed,
meaning nothing except that
we were always occupied,
or to put it simply never out.
After a while we walked like we were on stilts
made from string and sweetcorn tins.
We milled ginger biscuits
in our sheets.
We saw the dream house up in the distance
even when the curtains were closed.
Half the battle was not to doodle crenellations
on those final blueprints.
The house grew so large around us
that I could cat out on the bottom stair
waiting for you to pass over me,
an unmoored tower.
I promise none of this is a metaphor.
Tom Blake is a poet and music journalist who has two chapbooks out with The Red Ceilings Press: Ƨ (2023) and Peach Epoch (2025). His poems have appeared in Anthropocene and Perverse, and he is a regular contributor to KLOF magazine. Insta: tom_blake17
Maxine Sibihwana
here, water does not run. instead it
sits obediently in old plastic containers
Lesley Curwen
Her feet snagged in a cleverly-placed net
my sister waits for him to untangle her,
to hold her head still between thick fingers . . .
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Denizens Mice live in the London Tube. A train leaves and small pieces of sooty black detach themselves from the sooty black walls and forage for crumbs in the rubbish under the rails that are death to man. You can’t see their feet move. They...
Tina Cole
Mr. Pig modelling his best Sunday suit of farmyard smells,
flees from the cook’s cleaver to find himself a sow.
Ellora Sutton
My heart is breaking, so I’m setting up my new Wonder Oven.
The waft of toxicity as I run it on empty for ten minutes
is a welcome distraction.
Erin Poppy Koronis
Naked feet rush
over cold pebbles,
phone-torches light
our pathway to the sea.
Bob King
The first wristwatch was first worn
in 1810, despite what old turn-it-up
Flintstones episodes might have you
believe.
Brandon Arnold
Alone, I drive along the midnight, winter road. My left hand at the 12 o’clock position of the steering wheel. And I coast. I let out the day’s long breath, which started out today as a sigh.
Steph Ellen Feeney
My mother is here, and might not have been,
so I hold things tighter:
the small-getting-smaller of her
running with my daughter down the beach . . .