Today’s choice
Previous poems
Kit Duke
Photograph, 2008
See the statue: grain flecked
ridged with carvings
the smooth intonations of eyes
set quietly into the face
See me: four years old
palms to the stone
and my face tipped slightly forwards
to kiss the mouth opposite.
Our foreheads touch. Even as a child
I knew what love was,
one face fit into the other,
a sort of bracing of the hands
while the bodies found harmony
I didn’t know then,
moving for a mouth
that refused to yield an inch,
what it wasn’t.
Kit Duke is a queer writer and poet based in Stroud, England. He writes a lot about belonging, in all senses of the word. You can find him on Instagram, @kitduke24, or Substack, @kitduke.
Adele Evershed
Some Things My Mother Forgot to Teach Me (Before She Died)
A while ago I saw this prompt on Instagram
though I added ‘before she died’
because mine did—long before
anyway, I made a list
Sally Jenkins
Funny how Year 8 is doing bones
now, of all the weeks. In the prep room
we strip flesh off chicken wings
Chris Hardy
Memento Vivere We lived here once. The rain we heard fell everywhere. Silence except the wind across the ground. It’s best to keep quiet. Words are like dead seeds, they vanish when they’re said. * New Year’s Eve without stars or...
Siobhan Logan
There’s something wrong with the sky
it’s the colour of a bruise and smells
of burnt toast. Do you hear that noise?
Someone’s shredding the blue
Alex Searle
Something started you to wake,
Leaving sockprints in the parquet
H.J. Thomas
We ate it leaning against the rail
above the harbour –
black cherry,
melting down the cone
Stephen Keeler
Among the joys of love was when we got
our first apartment on a boulevard
above the trams and tree-tops and the wires
that cut the street like tangram puzzles and
Khairina Anindya, Genevieve Beech
‘Khair’
At the feet
of al-Ka‘ba
you asked for a daughter.
‘BIRTHLIGHT’
You are ordinary
to the teenager on the bus,
the doctor at our six-week check.
Linda McKenna
We set about him with rifle butts and spades,
waiting our turn alongside our enemies,
the same sunburnt flesh, the same blistered
feet. Met where our camps, the same