Today’s choice
Previous poems
Fatihah Quadri Eniola
How It Ends
There is an album of all the men
your mother have loved. It sits every
night in the deep silence of the
basement. Tonight, your mother
burns the album, she pours fire into
her longing. Every memory carries a
flame, every man with his own ash.
The moon in the balcony is an
abandoned lantern. Your mother
laughs into a sudden teardrop.
Fatihah Quadri Eniola is a Nigerian page and performance poet who uses poetry as a tool for advocacy. She is a strong advocate for gender equality, human rights, and community issues. Fatihah is the winner of the inaugural Pawner’s Paper Performance Poetry Prize for Peace and the 2025 Centre for Black and African Culture Poetry Prize, among other accolades. Her works have been published in Torch Literary Arts, The West Trade Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, and more. She has a background in Law from the University of Ibadan.
Cassandra Atherton, Paul Hetherington (co-authors)
Cassandra Atherton is a widely anthologised and award-winning prose poet and scholar of prose poetry. She was a Harvard Visiting Scholar in English and a Visiting Fellow at Sophia University, and is Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin...
Rebecca Gethin
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Will Snelling
A.M. P.M. Step out into the day’s whiteness And breathe the bad air. The early chill reminds you you’re here. The sky is birdless, And planes chew through the sinewy clouds. The taste of coffee is dark In your mouth. The hot black shock Tore open the...
Ben Banyard
Morning, Mister Magpie Think of all the chain letters you had to write, the time you were almost knocked down crossing to avoid a window cleaner’s ladder, the look on your face when I put that brolly up indoors. For you, 13 isn’t an ordinary...
Matt Nicholson
Birdsong in the playground I asked a sea-gull on a see-saw what’s it all for, what’s it all about? He said nowt and flew away. I asked a crow on a swing the self-same thing, but he refused to say anything, he just hopped off to the roundabout,...
Maggie Mackay
She believes herself to be a field creature Nessie is losing her mind boiling cotton with bleach all year long. She stalks lands and fields at twilight, fashions a dress from a beetle’s shell. The women in the dormitories don’t sleep a jot for...
Holly Bars
Holly Bars is a mature student currently studying at the University of Leeds. Holly’s poems have been published since January 2021 by The Moth, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Fragmented Voices, Porridge, Anti-Heroin Chic, Visual Verse, Runcible Spoon, and more, as...
David Hensley
The Waiting Game Waiting is a great leveller. sitting in the waiting room, differences of height and status are almost invisible: we are equally powerless, subservient to the unseen list and the occasional calls of doctors and administrators....
Ryan Norman
Garden I’ve woken at peace; it’s important not to think. I return instead to familiar images; steam rising from the boiler below the house, the pale leaves on the tree whose name I never learned. All I’ve ever done with these things is try to know...