Today’s choice
Previous poems
Chrissy Banks
The pink and the brown
So many times I walked
head down half asleep
along that ordinary road to school
until the day I saw the cherry trees
sick of standing around bored and invisible
all at once dressed up
sinewy brown limbs
embellished with ruffles and frills
profligate pom poms
as if those trees were calling to passers-by
wanting to share the glee
at their flowering
with everyone
The petals that soon fell under my feet
were turning from pink to brown
I carried them inside me
the pink and the brown
I held them inside with the grey and blue
deep indigo of the Irish Sea
that lapped
and stormed
all around the borders
of my island home
Doryn Herbst
Bee Dress After Girl with a Bee Dress image by Maggie Taylor For your sixteenth birthday, you got a dress made from a swarm of live bees, pulled in at the waist with a drawstring, which you were made to wear on special occasions. If you refused to...
Mandy Schiffrin
Soundtrack To A Pause There's a cornered big cat in my attic, snarling, lip-curled; its guttural growl swallowed at the back of its throat. Nearby, the deadened thunk of a skull, knocking persistently against the skylight: tick, tick, ticking, out...
Caroline Gilfillan
The Story of ‘I’ My ‘I’ landed with a thump. One day a mother was chasing the tails of two small sons, the next I was there, orange as an apricot. Distracted, she bundled me into blankets and tired cardigans, carried me home on her lap in the...
Abigail Ottley
Abigail Ottley writes poetry and short fiction from her home in Penzance. As an older woman writer with a passion for history, she usually has at least one foot in the past. facebook.com/abigailelizabethottley...
Mark Connors
Mark Connors is a poet from Leeds. Life is a Long Song was published by OWF Press in 2015, Nothing is Meant to be Broken by Stairwell Books in 2017. Optics was published by YAFFLE in 2019 and After in 2021. www.markconnors.co.uk.
Matthew Paul
The Semi-Fast Service to 1969 I catch snatches of serviced apartment blocks being unbuilt, rows of terraced houses resurrecting from a rubble heap back into their heyday. As per usual, when the train pulls in to 1999, I ease on a pair of swimming...
Jim Young
petrichor it has been raining in the night both french doors are open wide cool damp air converses around my knees not one flower moves except to drip occasionally the gentle violin music flows over the scene of my third cup of tea my third...
Kushal Poddar
Water, Guilt, Hemisphere You come in like water. I hear the ghost note, x, pp, turn to see you eerie in the half and half of the refrigerator light and my shadow. I don't need another guilt trip, stumble upon a photo album, lose myself in a...
Edward Vanderpump
Lost and Slaughtered Sisters The cruel stepmother, the Beast, I read of them, and other grimmer tales but, said mother, some are too nasty, just don't bother with those. That last one, the Bloody Chamber or the Forbidden Room, I shouldn't read...