Today’s choice

Previous poems

Colin Pink

 

 

 

Thorny (One Sided Conversations No4)
after seeing Akram Khan’s Giselle 18 Jan 2026

to embrace you is like clasping
a fist full of briars

if your mouth was an envelope
I’d lick it shut

you can push all you like against
the wall between

the living and the dead
but it won’t give

yet I hunger still
cannot forget the taste of you

your honeysuckle heart
is held in my grasp

and there is nowhere on earth
to put it down

 

 

Colin Pink co-chairs the Barnes & Chiswick poetry stanza. His books of poems are: Acrobats of Sound (2016), The Ventriloquist Dummy’s Lament (2019), Typicity (2021) and Wreck of the Jeanne Gougy (2021).

Sarah Boyd

He’s a house of cards, a delicately balanced pyramid
held together by hearing aids and dusty bifocals and
wobbling dentures and ageing pacemaker and
shirt with three buttons missing in action and

Samantha Carr

You became obsessed with nucleated red blood cells when you peeked through an
aperture window at your liquid, viscous nature. You became obsessed with maps

Helen Akers

we’re trying to construct a frame for this
‘highly reactive impulsive emotion’
the nurse is looking into it   

Jenny Robb

By the light of a wolf moon,
my father turns mad.
Anne whispers to a girl in the wind,
and a friend blows into my life.