Today’s choice
Previous poems
Emily A. Taylor
We turned a corner
Still I notice the white mole above
your lip. Shallow we breathe in
leather yew leaves. Branches slackened
by tomorrow’s dew. Like Cross Street
is a steam room and we are clean
white shrouding towels shawled
around each others’ breasts.
I move my hand long
so yours will follow, and though
this moment tastes of tequila soda
paracetamol pillowed on a fizzing tongue
amnesia… pull me in anyway.
What friendship? When we drop like moons
who miss the night. I mock the breeze
sweep your fringe aside. Ask your shameless
lips what they’re thinking.
Rahana K. Ismail
Evening Lists Inadequacies unreels our slippages. My daughter kaleidoscopes supermarket-aisles in the apartment lift monotone. Squirrelling through the doorway, she pictures what to; I don’t....
Caroline Sylge
Weekend Work Do Tina and I are circling the room at speed wrapped in white table cloths. Who knew this was what we came here for? We are tiddly after a day of contributing — to workshops in small groups, structured chats on the sunny lawn — by...
Tristan Moss
Getting Somewhere We don’t admit to depending on the brakes too much. But the garage tells us we need to change the pads again. We don’t enjoy brinkmanship, but our new tyres have already started to lose their grip. We don’t want to crash, we’re...
Marcelo Coelho
Broken English When I was younger, for a long time I assumed that being an immigrant, I could not fully understand or Enjoy English verse, wrote Elif Shafak, novelist, last Saturday In The Guardian. There would always be Something I would miss...
Olivia Burgess
Sainsburys, Chertsey. 3:30. Friday Our heads close, we walk the length of a hundred recounted steps, our time ghosts frequenting a town we have come to pace and slumber, maybe dance in. I watch the back of your head and the way the wind cradles...
Patrick Slevin
Carboot Every scratch from every needle is hidden inside these sleeves – the scars off inadvertent drops from when a certain personal hit was needed – carried around in square bags worn as badges accumulated on Saturdays browsing Eastern Bloc,...
Tom Kelly
The day job gave me a recurring dream on a frozen lake circles of ice were cut using giant hacksaw blades. Telling them I couldn’t swim as they smeared oil onto my shaking body was ignored. See them struggling placing me under the water chanting...
Jon Miller
Boy and Stick In the old black-and-white photo he’s still up that tree in the park, a shape among branches, a kind of negative space, detectable only by mathematics and his pull on other objects. In shorts. Moustache of milk. Scabbed knees. Coins...
Peter Viggers
A State of Being Under blue shadows of a red cliff I dream the sky will collapse. * The moon is an eye that does not suffer the sun is an eye that does not blink though it burns in the haven of my skull. * There are signs I have ignored knowing...