Today’s choice
Previous poems
Piers Haben
High-Visibility
The precondition for being a ghost is not only death but faith in an afterlife. Kit Fan.
When I lost loved ones last year
I thought my childhood fears would return.
Sleeping in mum’s house waiting
for the seen and felt,
the stupid spoon on the ouija board,
cold coming into a room.
Like when I swept offices, and ran
from the room with dummies in.
But now I find the absence more terrifying.
Oh god, maybe I don’t miss them enough.
Maybe the dead move amongst us
and we hurry through the ghost city,
like commuters, eyes down,
unaware of the cleaners coming home,
the men in high-vis jackets congregating
at the edge of the floodlit road.
Piers Haben is a British poet and recovering economist, currently living on Pico Island, Azores, where his writing explores the intersections of labour and island life, whilst also physically working with stone and soil. Piers was recently shortlisted for the 2025 Wolverhampton WoLF poetry competition.
Amirah Al Wassif
My double sits before me now. I stare deep into her, as I do every day after midnight. When I raise my hands, she raises hers.
Sophie Lankarani
Even though I only once traced your streets with my own feet,
you wandered into my dreams anyway
sliding in through my grandmother’s stories,
Mark A. Hill
She wills his brush in colour
and chalking, fierce hued flaws,
which fall flat on the canvas
Rebecca Wheatley
He thought his heart was broken yet the day began again.
Katie Beswick
We were on my pink love seat
skin touching skin
I was drunk but longing
circled me, like stars
from a cartoon head wound
Kate Hendry
So what if there’s a dead patch.
Remember the havoc
unfettered fire makes –
Christtie Jay
My Lord, let the record show
she remembered everyone else
before this. If you must, take her
in teaspoons
May Grier
I wasn’t to know
that it was a three-tusked
beast; that there was not one,
not two, but three
that grew the seed of me.
Daniel Hill
On her first day home, she took
to plucking the sky with tweezers—
latched on to clouds and waited