Today’s choice
Previous poems
H.J. Thomas
Black Cherry Ice Cream
We ate it leaning against the rail
above the harbour –
black cherry,
melting down the cone
faster than we could catch it.
And you laughed,
mouth red,
sunlight flaring in your lashes.
I watched the boats move below us –
slow beasts with canvas wings –
and thought:
this is joy.
Not fireworks,
not promises,
not certainty.
Just you,
offering me a bite
from your side
of the cone.
And the sweetness –
sharp and floral,
ripe as August before it turns.
H.J. Thomas is a poet based in Durham, UK. His work explores grief, queerness, and hope. He is working on his first collection, still here, and a second, Songs of Vancouver Island. Previously unpublished.
Julian Bishop
He emerges at nightfall, lights a solitary votive candle//
prostrates himself at her scuffed toes.
Jon Miller
Haul down the ladder and you’re in
under a skylight casting a blue dream.
Philip Gross
This is the song of the cells’
soft throb, the quivering coherences,
their shuffling the profit and loss
of life, to have and to hold.
Jenny Hope
No man can hold me.
See –
I blur the line between days . . .
Damaris West
In the circle
of its trees
the lochan shines
midnight silk.
B. Anne Adriaens
symptoms she is aggregate concrete and grit held together in a human shape lying on her side knees drawn up flesh tensing to stone and tendons in flames the weight of her body pressed into the mattress leaves a shallow hollow once she’s gone a...
Martin Potter
glimmer blades
the field’s lightly fogged
grass green
Moira McPartlin
Outside the Berber tent
the poet and I contemplate
the boundless Sahara sky.
Matthew James Friday
We totem our empires with the raptor,
weave into flags, fix on coins
but what of the victims?
How come no one ever glories the fish . . .