Today’s choice
Previous poems
L. Haiman
O is the Mother Letter
My baby is hungry. Grabs
me with both hands. I am
an apple, apparently no will. I give in
to his teeth and hate it. Him I love! I can’t say No and even when I do
I go back
On my word. It must be that consent is
Ancient.
Older even.
A code written
In our body, a binary of unspoken NO’s / misspoken YES’s,
I guess it must have started with a
( o )
Breast.
And mouths to feed: the need
to quench and satiate an Other at the great
Expense of self. Give comfort, forfeit
Feeling safe.
L. Haiman is a Romanian-born multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Margate, UK. L. Haiman’s work explores bilingualism, cultural identity, and intergenerational trauma across concrete poetry and prose. L. Haiman’s poetry writing has appeared in West Trade Review, The William and Mary Review, and Ink Sweat & Tears and was shortlisted for the Alpine Fellowship.
Francis de Lima
Oh London. U useless city. Map to
nowhere land. Tight stretch
open eye. The underground metal.
The night tube. The railway. Smog
Over coaltrip. The presence
Of machine upon machine. U
Miriam Swales
When I was 12, I knew the weight of a human head.
8 Heads in a Duffel Bag (a bit of dark comedy).
It grew from there. The curiosity. The calculations.
Alison Pritchard
By what rough science
were you given
this migraine of a name
Matt Gilbert
Disgust springs up from the guts
to meet a sprinting lump
of furry muscle.
Kathleen Bryson
I am the dreaming herpetogaster chimera and
I am part-and-parcel of the impossible animals project.
Scott Lilley
I’ve seen dozens of you about the Fylde,
face all vape, fatigue, some wild sense of
beard, black hair to border it all.
Rich Yates
The bird
crept up on him, threw its voice into an empty tree
Annie Kissack
Girl Awaits the Psychic Investigators They’re late. The table is laid with a clean cloth, all normal and neat. Our visitors, city men, may find it hard to navigate the path but we can wait. They hope to gather evidence of a haunting; whether he’ll...
Jim Murdoch
We don’t decide who we love.
Who we hate, yes,
who we’re jealous of,
but never who we end up loving.