Today’s choice

Previous poems

Sharon Black

 

 

 

Free Range

My thoughts are skittish,
peck at whatever they find.

I flick each whitewash flake
into the bin. Shadows on the walls

are darkened rooms
in which I lose myself, daily:

if I say that I look for this
at the edge of every brightness

would you hand me a prescription?
The house is rustling, I can’t get out.

I have a tongue for truth
and a tongue for lies. My mouth

is dry, all this barking. People say
I have something of the fox.

 

 

Sharon Black is from Glasgow and lives in the Cévennes mountains in France. Her fifth full collection of poetry, Things That Fruit in Darkness, was published in May 2026 by Vagabond Voices. She is editor of Pindrop Press.  www.sharonblack.co.uk

Gordon Vells

Impotent in family life and ineffectual at work,
sometimes he would spend a full quarter-hour
just circulating the mini-roundabout on his moped,
dizzy from the power of blocking everyone else.

Patrick Wright

i protest     say how when i’m gone i’d like to rest before the choice to return & go through 
all this again     you sigh as though that’s absurd & endings are just endings     we’re mulch 
& nothing but endless fucking 

Francis de Lima

Oh London. U useless city. Map to

                                                                        nowhere land. Tight stretch 

                                                                        open eye. The underground metal. 

The night tube. The railway. Smog

Over coaltrip. The presence

                                                                          Of machine upon machine. U

Miriam Swales

When I was 12, I knew the weight of a human head.
8 Heads in a Duffel Bag (a bit of dark comedy).
It grew from there. The curiosity. The calculations.