Today’s choice
Previous poems
Claire Harnett-Mann
Common Ground
Behind the block, the night tears in scrub-calls.
Fox kill scores the morning,
ripped by prints in muck.
There’s a form for this, a number to call,
an action plan, a statement
on how the city manages its wild,
what to do when it breaches the scheme.
Rain fingers the concrete.
Walls sweat. Moss thickens on the sills
where pigeons nest.
Doors swell in their frames.
The lift’s out again.
Kids chalk round the mould,
name them death zones.
Someone’s planted potatoes
in a washing-up bowl.
Roots force through the split base,
muscle for the ground below.
This place won’t stay as it’s built.
It shifts, it breaks, gets dragged
to the scrub, to the night calls,
to the unmanaged wild.
Claire Harnett-Mann is a Birmingham-based poet whose work appears in Tears in the Fence and elsewhere. A Nine Arches Press Primers 8 Highly Commended poet, her novella How to Bring Him Back (Fly on the Wall, 2021) was nominated for a Saboteur Award. She can be found on Instagram and Bluesky @clairehmwriter
Anna Ruddock
Let it be okay that it took me a while to get here
If not better then equally fine to be
the goldfinch . . .
Laura Fyfe
How do we pull ourselves back
when we’ve nothing to hold on to?
Find a way clear
or stay? Wait.
David Belcher
How to not exist
Allow yourself to be elbowed aside
become a non-person
an avoider of lingering looks
Simon Williams
I Want to Become
a weasel, in a sleeky, twisty body,
all eyes and teeth like a deadly zip.
Zoe Davis
I joined a secret society
advertised in the back pages of a magazine.
I forget which, but I found it nestled
in 8pt font and fancy border
between time share apartments in Lanzarote
and the commemorative plates.
Callan Waldron-Hall
long weekend ← or ← perhaps ↑ summer holiday →
from the back of someone’s car boot ↑ the strange →
sweated plastic all pink and blue and folded →
Amy King
We’re drinking wine in your kitchen, months before
the hot oil of my concern begins to spit.
Jenny Robb
You notice the crepe of your neck and belly first.
This skin you bake in the sun.
Pat Edwards
Watching the ‘Strictly’ Results Show on a Sunday night
Knowing what we know about the pain of the world,
who wins and who loses might feel like a betrayal.