The Lonely Crowd will feature new work by a different poet each month throughout 2025. For October, we are delighted to publish three new works by Michelle Penn. The first of these, ‘I’m arranging angels on the head of a pin‘, is published today with two more poems to follow throughout the month. 

I’m arranging angels on the head of a pin

So tiny, they flit inside my palm, sweet crumbs of cake, spicy little flecks
that burn.

Angels swarming from my books, scattering my papers, jumbling the clothing
in my closet, displacing the moths. Nights, they buzz my ears, like mosquitoes.
Mornings, the sheets so laden with angels, I can barely move.

I am careful catching them. Even when they fight, bite my thumbs
with spiky angel teeth, I carry them tenderly, nudge them onto the pin.

It stands in its own cushion: white velvet, plush as a cherub’s butt.

This act — balancing angels, one onto another — does not
make me God. Far from it.

(I tried for years to balance my life on the head of a pin — all my desires
and doubts, my pain — but I was clumsy and
pricked myself more than once. Eventually, the pin snapped.)

I organise angels in neat rows, tidy stacks and pyramids. I know
this tidying will give me space to think, make changes long overdue.

Michelle Penn‘s new collection, Retablo for a door, is forthcoming from Shearsman Books in January 2026. Michelle is also the author of the book-length poem, Paper Crusade (Arachne Press, 2022), and the pamphlet, Self-portrait as a diviner, failing (Paper Swans Press, 2018).