Today’s choice
Previous poems
Elijah MacBean
My Name is My Name
Ami never let anyone call my sister Sam –
it always had to be Samina.
She said she’d rather be waterboarded
than let her daughter be whitewashed
by whites too conservative to spare
the extra syllables.
Ami never let anyone call me Eli –
it always had to be Elijah.
She said she loved bursting bubbles
of Baby Boomers who thought
Elijah was reserved for blonde-haired boys
with crosses around their necks.
Ami never let anyone misspell our surname –
it always had to be MacBean.
She said the A tethered me,
to my father’s Scottish side,
steady between his body beneath,
and his spirit above.
Elijah MacBean is a mixed-race British Kashmiri-Scottish writer from Accrington, Lancashire.
Rosie Jackson
I Am Trying to Love Frank O’Hara More
I really am! I am trying not to see his exclamation marks as cheap melodrama and his endless conjunctions as some kind of separation anxiety or fear of mortality for what do full stops signify except dying
Charlotte Holm, Jennifer A McGowan
A leaky drainpipe drips
creating damp patches on uneven paving,
slime green algae blossoms
forming viridescent ripples
James McDermott
if samsara’s concrete please don’t come back
as black jackal for I live in Norwich
nor spineless worm as I don’t have a lawn
Cheryl Snell, Alice Gregorio, Peter Lilly
I grew up on a farm so I should know all about expensive cows and free milk. You’re taking being a debutante much too literally. We only meant to give permission for you to make a good match, not flit among the suitable boys…
Jade Kleiner
There is the green that birthed all pine trees.
Tom Blake
We were the housing and the housed,
meaning nothing except that
we were always occupied,
or to put it simply never out.
Kate Bonfield
Coming home to days of heat
trapped beyond the door, to time skewed
by time away, the house bigger and
smaller than before.
Precious Ejim
I don’t know why I look to my mother
for her shadow never stays.
Jackson
I want to tell my mother,
I made a successful loaf
in the bread machine you didn’t know
you were leaving me