Today’s choice
Previous poems
Colin Dardis
Mausoleum
A house is a machine for living in.- Le Corbusier
I have never climbed a tree,
never broken a bone
and will never walk on water.
I open my little window
and worry about possibilities:
imprudent intruders
of bird or cat, the wind, the cold.
The sky often tells me
when it’s time to close up again.
Some days, the house
is where you do your dying.
The true living waits outside.
Colin Dardis is a writer and editor from Northern Ireland. He edits the Poem Alone blog, and is co-host of Purely Poetry, an open mic night in Belfast. His recent collections are My Life Is A Film I Haven’t Yet Watched (Buttonhook Press, 2025), and with the lakes (above/ground press, 2024). www.colindardispoet.co.uk
Susie Wilson
Ceilings don’t hold water well.
Burst a pipe at the top
of an apartment block
to test this theory, if you will.
Andy Breckenridge
Abertawe After Richard Siken For CHD Tell me about the time I mansplained that Swansea is the English for Abertawe and means town at the mouth of the River Tawe. And about when, from the hill above Rhossili beach Lundy Island’s spectral mass...
Mark Wyatt
Daedalus
Plato loved his incessant questioning
of the natural world’s engineering
Sue Wallace-Shaddad
I tempt you with morsels
of soft-skinned peach, a pear sliced
in quarters, pipless and skinless.
Lesley Burt
Red-hot-pokers blazon her two world wars in flowerbeds, and in her hearth. The coalman drops odd nuggets under gaslight for neighbours to fetch in a bucket.
From the Archives: Dipo Baruwa-Etti
Seats
Before a table of white
People, I stand with ballet
Slippers strapped/soft soles
Head pointed towards the angels…
Ian Harker
The first night you lay down your head in London
there is hawthorne between your sheets.
Julian Bishop
He emerges at nightfall, lights a solitary votive candle//
prostrates himself at her scuffed toes.
Jon Miller
Haul down the ladder and you’re in
under a skylight casting a blue dream.