Today’s choice
Previous poems
Isabelle Thompson
‘Attention, after all is prayer’ (Jo Bell)
We saw a kingfisher threading the bright needle
of his body along the river. We saw a shag, stamping
her prehistoric shadow on the sky. We saw a hobby,
compact, fierce, not a sinew out of place, alert and spare,
watching us from his high vantage. All these were miracles,
but miraculous too was the stag beetle, thick and black,
gleaming against the white snowdrops; miraculous
and strange was the rat in the car park who sat
licking her tiny paws, her soft brown body touched
with beads of rain, her eyes dark as holes, hypnotic,
calling to us to watch her, note her unnoticed loveliness.
Isabelle Thompson is a graduate of Bath Spa University’s MA in Creative Writing, where she now works as a research assistant on programmes related to storytelling. Her debut pamphlet, Stalin’s Parrot, is published in May 2026 by Poetry Space.
Royal Rhodes
Halfway within
the sheltering woods
you found yourself.
Claire Walker
we are holding each other so we don’t forget
the way water holds us.
Sue Spiers and Mike Huett for Day Three of our Archive Feature
You will need four hundred items in the stew of her:
cumin, lemon, colocynth, bitter apple, lime, broccoli
to get the aftertaste she would want in your memory.
– Sue Spiers
It took years to piece events
together; hushed voices, evasions,
or little glances…
– Mike Huett
Zeeshan Choudhury and Emma Lara Jones for Day Two of our Archive Feature
Took my pain, buried it in buttercream.
Unboxed, licked off the top, Masticated
each grain into saline, let my bloodstream
drip-feed membranes their acid-fat. In bed,
-Zeeshan Choudhury
consists of tiny pink erasers,
safety pins, shirt buttons and the odd
butterfly clip.
-Emma Lara Jones
Mymona Bibi for Day One of our Archive Feature
corners folded
edges worn.
where girls in
the night’s meski
giggle in secret
hair in tangles.
Catherine O’Brien
When all is quiet save for the silky rustling of an autumn breeze
let that love show.
When your patience is darkness-dappled and as weary as an exhausted scholar
let that love show.
Marianne Habeshaw
session in the woods. Someone took a feather
to the hairdressers. Gum cross-sectioned
my cheek; he forgot about removal to kiss.
Had to avoid tree roots, placed us on green.
He mentioned his bullied niece kept reaching
for her blanket; Mr. Smith is quaking regression,
Fergal O’Dwyer
but sunlight streaming in
through impractically curtainless windows;
my skin, made-up in golden light,
looking taught from affluence
and vitamins.
Like they do in films,
Hattie Graham
wait for the witch who comes to pick wild garlic.
Together we can be brave and
pull the green bits from her teeth.
Wandering the glen with
nothing in our pockets, we can search
for the place where fairies still live.
No one will find us there,
not even the old grey bell they ring at tea time.