Today’s choice
Previous poems
Rushika Wick
quiet
slid in bass-drop dams up
pierced ears, furred
with youth, his vest drinks sweat,
high-tops, Moog-loop
domed cap punctured
with embroidery, brailled
ethnographic record, reverb
haze of brisk lavender, wire mesh
trash of the park, sun-burnt song,
something about the power
of gaze, arc of hand to the ring’s
negative space – astrological
movement in the ecology of court,
echo, orb, limbs
stirring over him inter
a pattern. pattern up – this belonging
this world, the bounce
the squeak, hot bodies on bail
from sentences of looming
adulthood, the classroom
the death of a father
Rushika Wick is a writer, editor and paediatrician. Her first collection Afterlife As Trash (Verve 2021) was highly commended in the Forwards. She is interested in the poetics of witness, infections and cyborg identities and co-edited the Disease Anthology published by Carnaval Press in 2022. Rushika currently holds a scholarship at the Poetry School x Newcastle University MA in writing poetry.
John Saunders
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Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
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Doryn Herbst
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Mandy Schiffrin
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Caroline Gilfillan
The Story of ‘I’ My ‘I’ landed with a thump. One day a mother was chasing the tails of two small sons, the next I was there, orange as an apricot. Distracted, she bundled me into blankets and tired cardigans, carried me home on her lap in the...
Abigail Ottley
Abigail Ottley writes poetry and short fiction from her home in Penzance. As an older woman writer with a passion for history, she usually has at least one foot in the past. facebook.com/abigailelizabethottley...
Mark Connors
Mark Connors is a poet from Leeds. Life is a Long Song was published by OWF Press in 2015, Nothing is Meant to be Broken by Stairwell Books in 2017. Optics was published by YAFFLE in 2019 and After in 2021. www.markconnors.co.uk.
Matthew Paul
The Semi-Fast Service to 1969 I catch snatches of serviced apartment blocks being unbuilt, rows of terraced houses resurrecting from a rubble heap back into their heyday. As per usual, when the train pulls in to 1999, I ease on a pair of swimming...
Jim Young
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