Today’s choice
Previous poems
Autumn Richardson
Hive
What you are –
bodied light, a store of oil
a hive of warm blood
chemicals flooding a brain, calculating
a furnace
filament of awareness in
a palpating dark
a treeless dark
a stone-edged dark
coal river dark.
Flesh and its impermanence.
Autumn Richardson is a poet, editor and translator. Since 2009 she has been co-director of multimedia publishing house Corbel Stone Press. Her most recent pamphlet is The Long Before (CSP 2026). She lives in Connemara, Ireland. www.instagram.com/autumnrichardson_poet
Fianna Russell Dodwell for Mental Health Awareness Week
I’ll tell you a bedtime story . . .
William Manning for Mental Health Awareness Week
My room is infested with bedbugs
I’m covered in bites, not love bites
Anna Brook
I want to borrow gods
(as Adrienne does,
though she knew better)
their sad logic
their templates
Nigel King
Turn the mud. Bo Peep’s head tumbles out,
wide-eyed, mouth a little open.
Mohsen Hosseinkhani translated by Tahereh Forsat Safai
Men are the color of soil
Women are sitting on the ashes
Stephen Komarnyckyj
you are the shadow slipping through the mirror
Jo Farrant
We’re stuck on a scene, frozen, like the ice cubes I begged Mum to get with the little flowers in them. Like taking a test in the school gym but your knees are so big they’re banging into the desk.
Douglas K Currier
Afternoon hangs in the air, and the birds leave.
Frogs begin to talk to each other, and the heat congeals.
Stephen Chappell
If you could call that friend,
the special one,
the one you always love and know loves you
