Today’s choice

Previous poems

Tess Jolly

by | Oct 23, 2026 | ,

 

 

 

Fish and Chips

When I went round the next day
with a bottle of wine, his wife said
he was bruised down both sides
from squeezing through
our upstairs bathroom window.
He’d been on his way to get more fish
from the freezer at the end of their garden
when he saw us next door:
you, not good with heights, stopped
around four rungs up,
and me, heavily pregnant, holding the base
and weakly cheering you on.
He jumped over the fence
and did what needs must,
no locksmith needed, and Josie,
still asleep in her cot, none the wiser,
though his customers must have wondered
what was taking so long –
Friday night and the queue spilling
along the street as he ascended –
until he appeared with a smile
and a How can I help?,
went back to the everyday work
of stirring flour and milk into gold.

 

 

 

Tess Jolly has published two collections, Intimate Architecture and Breakfast at the Origami Café, both with Blue Diode Press. She lives with her family on the south coast of the UK, where she runs her freelance editing business: www.poemsandproofs.co.uk.

Jason Lovell

by | Aug 18, 2026 | ,

While children kneel at your cage in awe
edge offerings of cashew nuts, chopped fruit,
curse words into your magnificent beak,
mums settle carrier bags at tired wet feet

Elijah MacBean

by | Aug 17, 2026 | ,

      My Name is My Name Ami never let anyone call my sister Sam – it always had to be Samina. She said she’d rather be waterboarded than let her daughter be whitewashed by whites too conservative to spare the extra syllables. Ami never let anyone call...

Damen O’Brien

by | Aug 16, 2026 | ,

The coastline’s smile is sharp with blackened teeth,
seabird shelters, scarps, cutaways, broken reefs:
the bloody mouth of a boxer who can’t be dropped,
punch drunk with the brain’s purple pounding . . .