Today’s choice
Previous poems
Sarah Nathan
There’s The Big Things
The ash that screams into the night,
the lake that dries, the child amongst the rubble,
the heat, the fire, the lack of books,
the men who’ve clearly lost their minds.
And then there’s the small. The glass that smashes
on the floor, a relic glazed in blue.
The seedlings devoured in their pots,
the text that rattles round a broken phone,
the children needing less and less,
a sense of being all alone. A backwards glance,
a hurried kiss, left on edge in sweat and fear,
not knowing how to survive at all.
In the night the stomach swells,
and water churns around. A tiny foot
imprints skin, from the inside out.
I’m woken by birds at dawn to this
back-to-front and broken dream
and now you pull away,
umbilicus strained,
a leaf that falls,
a different season yet again.
Sarah Nathan is a teacher and writer from East Lothian, Scotland. She has poems featured in The Dark Horse, Outcrop Poetry, Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature and forthcoming in The Poetry Lighthouse and from the roots (Glasgow University’s creative writing anthology). When not in the classroom she can mostly be found at the beach.
Anna Bowles
Akademichna Street
is bombed-out flats, is
the hot-pink Sweet Bakery Café, is
straggly new-planted trees, is
Philip Athans
Never shows up late to a single thing he’s invited to
Always brings the most thoughtful and carefully curated and perfect gift
Never shows up early and never once overstays his welcome
Always appears well groomed and clean and appropriately dressed
Michelle Diaz
This is just a woman,
sticking her life back together
after years spent recovering.
Autumn Richardson
What you are –
bodied light, a store of oil
a hive of warm blood
Rebecca Parfitt
In the back of the taxi on my way to the hospital,
thighs clenched together,
the driver asked me,
Samarth Agarwal
Here — in the absolute zero of space — fireworks!
Look how the crucibles of creation,
those million coloured fingers that stretch light years —
Jenny Scoones
We unlearn how it felt to touch
And resume our separate days in shirts and trousers,
Like hazmats against the sun and its longing,
The moon with its underbelly pulls.
Matt Bryden
Now a blanket is spread, offerings
of chutney and shin bones,
a taper held to the fire
that heats the tar beneath our boats.
Kit Duke
I didn’t know then,
moving for a mouth
that refused to yield an inch,
what it wasn’t.