Today’s choice
Previous poems
Ken Evans
Octopus
I am one Like short of being beautiful.
Five hundred more Followers, I’m away
to fight culture wars. I Block two for lies
Quora does not verify. Counter-factuals
are ok, there’s simmering wastelands
to make out of vague, but someone sent
a shroom Emoji I do not understand
the meaning of, though all Emojis
are cuckoo spit on new pasture.
I love the chaste, hard summaries of AI,
all-knowing and naive as the christchild,
a friend, reading headlines in bathwater
we share and if viewed from beyond
the bathroom door, it’s hard to say where
one green, suckering leg ends and another
begins. We are like octopus in small crevices
the oceans flow through to gyrate, moil us.
Ken Evans’ collection, ‘A Full-on Basso Profundo’ (Salt) published 2025. He won the Kent & Sussex; runner-up, Daily Telegraph and AUB; commended, Cafe Writer’s. Poems in Magma, Poetry Scotland, Acumen, UtR.
Stephen Chappell
She has a way of tilting your head
as if lining up a thought.
Tristan Moss
I try
not to think
about my daughter’s
condition
when I
hug her
Susan J. Atkinson
I tell you my heart is breaking
but the heart has four chambers
and is not shaped like a heart at all
Peter Daniels
No, no one is who they think they are,
nor what we think they are, either:
the demon inside is thinking it
and you can’t tell him.
Paul Stephenson
Like one of those horses
on the carousel
going round and round in circles
sliding up and down a pole
Rob A. Mackenzie
Everything is moving. I have to remind myself
it’s a flat canvas and behind it a wall that’s solid
as I am.
Melanie Branton
A vixen or a reason. A
rave. No air, no sex, nor
Charlotte Oliver
On a bench outside Next,
a punctured woman
traces circles in the air with
a pale finger
Peter Devonald
He is bitterest regrets,
dark chocolate, olives and kale,
The Telegraph and Magritte’s
pipe, the treachery of images.