Today’s choice
Previous poems
Ian Seed
Draenog
What was the Welsh for ‘hedgehog’? That was what he wanted to know. It was a word he could only remember in his sleep when he dreamt of himself as a small boy, barefoot, back in 1966. The sun was shining. He was wandering across fields and streams, and then what seemed like forever along a winding lane. It was only when he found a hedgehog, dead, stuck to the tarmac with its own flesh, that he realised he had no idea how to find his way back to the campsite where his mum would be making tea. A car swept by. Black bits cut into the soles of his feet.
Ian Seed’s most recent publications include Forgetfulness (Shearsman, 2026), My Outsize Hank Williams Cowboy Hat, with artwork by Lupo Sol (Sacred Parasite, 2025), and The Dice Cup, from the French of Max Jacob (Wakefield, 2023). Find him at www.ianseed.co.uk
Rose Lennard
Each year we climbed to that place high above the ruins.
Melanie Tibbs
People came to find out what ‘Garage Sale’ meant
in a small village landlocked county early burning comet tail
of Thatcher’s Britain.
Alfie Nawaid
a cowboy is that split second of doubt between victim
and victor, quick whipcrack out the corner of the mouth,
Stuart Rawlinson
I’m nineteen, I’m ancient.
I am so hungover
one of my eyes has fallen out…
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.