Today’s choice
Previous poems
Claire Harnett-Mann
Common Ground
Behind the block, the night tears in scrub-calls.
Fox kill scores the morning,
ripped by prints in muck.
There’s a form for this, a number to call,
an action plan, a statement
on how the city manages its wild,
what to do when it breaches the scheme.
Rain fingers the concrete.
Walls sweat. Moss thickens on the sills
where pigeons nest.
Doors swell in their frames.
The lift’s out again.
Kids chalk round the mould,
name them death zones.
Someone’s planted potatoes
in a washing-up bowl.
Roots force through the split base,
muscle for the ground below.
This place won’t stay as it’s built.
It shifts, it breaks, gets dragged
to the scrub, to the night calls,
to the unmanaged wild.
Claire Harnett-Mann is a Birmingham-based poet whose work appears in Tears in the Fence and elsewhere. A Nine Arches Press Primers 8 Highly Commended poet, her novella How to Bring Him Back (Fly on the Wall, 2021) was nominated for a Saboteur Award. She can be found on Instagram and Bluesky @clairehmwriter
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I have to admire you in your striped suit
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The sea happens to me today
not because I’m the woman in the bakers
brusque turned rude
or the peaches still hard in the bowl
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Sunlight saunters in long, thin wires through the fallow field
of my bedroom. You approach, a migrating heron
in a runny yolk collar and suntanned shorts, a white-light emissary
of hope. . .
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I’m waiting for news I don’t want to talk about
and scrolling through old photos to escape.
After some swipes, I see you walking away.
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The night before we left we smoked opium
for the first time and didn’t sleep.
Angela France
Perhaps some small creature fallen
from where it should be. I am unsure
whether I saw it move.