Today’s choice
Previous poems
Alicia Byrne Keane
Bureaucracies of Water
I’ve been reading about ghost apples.
They are a real phenomenon, like how
everyone we can see on the wide street
outside this building is still living,
managing thus far, attending appointments,
the fissures in their teeth holding sugar
or leaf-fibre. A ghost apple
is something the name of which I keep
forgetting so I call them glass apples instead,
which is more what they look like.
During a cold snap, fruit breaks
under its own skin; rain settles solid
as information. It takes more for an apple
to freeze, compared to water.
Lower temperature, an increase of nights.
So the flesh falls away & the ice remains,
pitted as an Autumn made of breath
or so it seems, the stalk and branch
leading to cloud-crater, iridescent air.
When we went to the sandspit island
to see our city mirrored, lights wavering
by the bulk of the docks, we each spoke
only briefly from the wind-whip of our bikes
of the lake that was forming there
among dun reeds, tenuous dunes.
This place floodplain & changing shape
from the beginning. A puddle joins another
to become rippled azure, the land
a surprised letter with absence in its middle:
p peninsula, b breakers, d disappearance.
Dr. Alicia Byrne Keane‘s poetry has been published in The Stinging Fly, Oxford Poetry and Poetry Ireland Review, among other journals. Alicia’s second collection is forthcoming from Broken Sleep Books in autumn 2026.
Will Snelling
The garden shudders, brushed with ice,
its edges slightly blurred away
by cloud unfolding over the grass.
Jonathan Croose
The gravel drive seems longer now,
the knock feels like a split of skin
and out on the fen road, by now there are chalk marks,
diagrams and calculations, cones and contraflows,
plastic zips and silent spinning lights.
No more need for sirens there,
but here, here on the doorstep, every alarm must ring.
Gordon Scapens
Hid some between hearing
and interpretation,
made a new alphabet.
Hid some between wit
and pedantic speeches
to fool anyone listening.
Gary Jude
The mandibles look like the tusks
of some gigantic bull elephant bagged
by hunters posing for a photograph
in pith helmets next to a tent
and a wind up phonograph.
David Keyworth
Aldgate had its usual smell of dirty metal and coffee. I jumped from platform to carriage. I squeezed beside a Tate Britain poster, clutched the grab-handle. When I chanced a glance, I saw I was the only one standing. Everyone else was wearing spacesuits.
Winifred Mok, Sandra Noel, Özge Lena and Alannah Taylor for Earth Day
we groan as the mercury hikes
climbing with the ball of fire
the Hot Weather Warning surrenders its flag
feels like 40 and it’s only May Day
-Winifred Mok
where geese balance on one leg
sleeping inside themselves
until they wake for hours of sun
and swimming
-Sandra Noel
You are walking in a half empty street. Carrying a rifle, you are hunting for canned food. Sultry evening falls like an electrified blanket, leaving you breathless. The world you know is long gone. The world has already surrendered to the heat waves followed by water wars, hunger wars. And hunger is a crazy carnivore in your belly. You turn a corner to see two rifles. Pointed at you. You shoot the air calmly.
-Özge Lena
I might eat more slowly, breathe more deeply the fragrance of nettle steep, be more mindful of
the miracle of vegetables of promising colour glinting in the oil of a pan, I might grind my molars
with the thought close that their substance, too, is borrowed from the minerals of the ground
-Alannah Taylor
Cal O’Reilly
I feel the sun, its love and anger,
a baked red brick rubbed
on the back of my calves.
Hiking in a binder was a shit idea,
My lungs reach to surface, come short.
Lucy Dixcart
It Starts Before Birth
Your tadpole-self, displayed to strangers for a thumbs-up.
Then childhood illnesses, faithfully documented.
Anna Mindel Crawford
We have our eyes on the chairs, ready
for when the music stops. Nobody wants
to be in the space where a seat had been