Today’s choice

Previous poems

Hannah Linden

 

 

 

Humanoid

I was cutlery left out in the rain, rusty
by morning, a side-slipping fiddlestick
desperate for music, starved for company.

You were a knockoff  BOGOF version
of a briny punk with a commitment phobia
permanently out of your habitat and time zone.

We were observable repairs, reorganised
schedules looking for a fix, butchered
invoices and recriminations.

They were observing aliens, measuring
intonation and feedback loops. And we
let them cut into us because we felt

we owed them for letting us play ‘being
human’. And we were wild and free
as they loaded us into the future machines.

 

 

Hannah Linden won Cafe Writers Poetry Competition 2021, Highly Commended Wales Poetry Award 2021 & 2nd prize Leeds Peace Poetry Prize 2024. Her debut pamphlet, The Beautiful Open Sky (V. Press), shortlisted for Saboteur Award 2023. BlueSky: @hannahl1n.bsky.social

Simon Williams

What were these fairies called
before we knew of hummingbirds?
Bumblebee moth because of the size?
Reed-nose moth because of the proboscis?

Daniel Sluman

just as the night sky shifts
beyond the minds

of the animals outside

the ceilings
we are pressed beneath change

in aspect & colour

Farah Ali

Notes from nature on how to survive this:
 
1. Learn crypsis and mimesis be a gecko or a mossy frog
 
2. Method actors sway like dead-leaf mantises on branches