Today’s choice
Previous poems
Sarah Boyd
Finely balanced
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
tea-stained cardigan with more holes than wool and
21st birthday watch that never stops ticking and
hernia truss and extra large incontinence pants and
braces and belt to support saggy-kneed trousers and
over-stretched socks and ulcer bandage and
triple-E shoes with Velcro straps
and
one trip on the rug he’s been told to throw
in the dustbin, a mix-up with his meds, one jug of
water not touched all day, or one ill-judged lunge
for the walking frame, and the whole lot
will come crashing down on the floral patterned,
wall-to-wall Axminster.
Sarah Boyd is a student on the MA Writing Poetry run by Poetry School and Newcastle University. Her poems have appeared in Frogmore Papers, Dreich, The Cannon’s Mouth and elsewhere. She came second in the 2025 Arts Richmond Poetry Prize.
David Belcher
How to not exist
Allow yourself to be elbowed aside
become a non-person
an avoider of lingering looks
Simon Williams
I Want to Become
a weasel, in a sleeky, twisty body,
all eyes and teeth like a deadly zip.
Zoe Davis
I joined a secret society
advertised in the back pages of a magazine.
I forget which, but I found it nestled
in 8pt font and fancy border
between time share apartments in Lanzarote
and the commemorative plates.
Callan Waldron-Hall
long weekend ← or ← perhaps ↑ summer holiday →
from the back of someone’s car boot ↑ the strange →
sweated plastic all pink and blue and folded →
Amy King
We’re drinking wine in your kitchen, months before
the hot oil of my concern begins to spit.
Jenny Robb
You notice the crepe of your neck and belly first.
This skin you bake in the sun.
Pat Edwards
Watching the ‘Strictly’ Results Show on a Sunday night
Knowing what we know about the pain of the world,
who wins and who loses might feel like a betrayal.
Rebecca Gethin
Oh walk with me up the slippery lane
when the frost has turned to ice.
Jean Atkin
Wear a coat, you’ll pass through light rain at the wood-edge
under Helmeth. Sing loudly, so the snakes can hear you.