Today’s choice
Previous poems
Precious Ejim
Motherly misery
I don’t know why I look to my mother
for her shadow never stays.
promises are whispered
soft as fur, then shed.
I grow between hunger and shame,
guilty for wanting warmth,
from her body.
she is not cruel.
only miserable.
the kangaroo with a torn pouch
sometimes I’m carried,
sometimes I fall.
I gather my own shelter:
sticks, spit, scraps––
digging through what others discard
to make something that might hold.
then she returns, a bird
swoops low, lifts me briefly,
as if love were instinct
never permanent.
I don’t know why I look to my mother
for her shadow won’t stay.
Precious Ejim is a writer from Boston, Massachusetts. Her work explores womanhood, longing, and emotional vulnerability in contemporary life. She is interested in intimacy, interiority, and the emotional textures of being young and female.
Jackson
I want to tell my mother,
I made a successful loaf
in the bread machine you didn’t know
you were leaving me
Kath Mckay
How to become two-dimensional
Die. You’re soon reduced to a photograph.
Lugubrious Co-op undertakers will zip you in a bag
and keep you cold . . .
Cindy Botha
atlas bear
black-footed ferret
cape lion
Jasmine Gibbs
This morning – Blackstar,
Bowie, those jazz swan songs
sputtering from the CD player,
wild trumpets that convulse
through negative space
Jane Pearn
the pool holds my face
my breath
ripples the water
Robin Lindsay Wilson
The single crimson rose
she wears in her lapel,
to test his imperfections,
draws him into detail
Ian Hickey
When the half-light drops below the horizon
the birth of darkness comes
Rose Lennard
My mother died seven years ago, but last night
she had a message for me. The mechanics
are irrelevant, what she gave stays with me
Rongili Biswas
Girls under the tree,
one with hands clasped as in worship,
the others picking
the scarlet fallen seeds