Today’s choice
Previous poems
Kweku Abimbola
Dance With My Father
after Luther
I never danced with my father
more so beside him, sometimes
across in the clock face
of summer dance circles.
My father walks backwards
better than most walk forward—
so whenever he sewed his steps into the living
room carpet, I rushed to mirror my moon-
walking, until he froze,
froze like he’d been caught
by the beat.
But eventually, every good beat
releases, thawing him
allowing a new current to jolt his right heel
lick his leg, startle
his hips
jimmie his torso, electrocute
his shoulders before
departing through his fingertips.
Then he’d leave his hand dangling, dangling
close enough for me to touch
but we never touched— only the illusion of—
and that’s the trick,
and the trick continues through my body:
elbows, navel,
neck, and fingertips
till it’s my turn to pass the zap to you:
You see my hand, are you ready? Ready
to mimic what it’s like
to be held
and to make it look so good
make it look so clean
your audience will beg you
to do it
again!
Born in the Gambia, Kweku Abimbola earned his MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. He is of Gambian, Ghanaian, Nigerian, and Sierra Leonean descent.
Abimbola’s first full-length poetry collection, Saltwater Demands a Psalm, was published by Graywolf Press in 2023. The début collection was selected by Tyehimba Jess to receive the Academy of American Poets’ First Book Award. In 2024, Saltwater also received a gold medal Florida Book Award and the inaugural Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize. His work interrogates the intersections of West African spirituality, ethnomusicology, cultural expression, and poetics to appreciate the legacies of Black literature on a global scale.
He has worked as a teaching artist for the Detroit-based literary nonprofit Inside Out Literary Arts and lectured in English and Creative Writing at the University of Michigan. Abimbola is currently an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Loyola Marymount University. He is also the Poet Laureate of El Segundo, California.
www.kwekuabimbola.com
Hannah Linden
Sister Death Sits on the Back of the Settee It shouldn’t be such a surprise. She knew me better than most people, after all. So cosy. And yes, in the womb I gobbled her up and thought I’d won. But you forget such things. Behind me like a pantomime...
Marion McCready
I Fall in Love with a Tree Everywhere I Go When I shut my eyes all I see is the sky hung with oranges like a dozen orange golf balls; the tree itself on display like a circus animal. I am where the palm trees rise and fall on the horizon; where...
Preeth Ganapathy
Morning Conversations Every Gulmohar flower is a vermillion cup of the night’s sweet nectar that drenches the birds’ parched songs. Every branch is a perch for daylight to scout, to rest and to tread lightly without leaving prints. The parrots...
George Freek on Holocaust Memorial Day
Sonata for the Dead (After Li Shangyin) Crows pick at the rotting bones of skeletons who gaze with sightless eyes at the stars, where our dreams abide, but never come alive. Crows, seeking somewhere to feed, scatter like fallen leaves, as wind...
Claire Smith
Fish-Tale She gorged on forests, gluttonous for the town, craved torchlit streets every time she went back to normality. She swapped her tail for a man washed up on the shore along with the shingle, salt-seaweed, and crab-carapace. She burns...
Jay Délise
The Love Poems I finally took the trash out, sent that email, and had enough clean dishes to eat a meal at the table but there was no time to write the poem Before you woke up this morning I slipped into the cool autumn air in search of the...
Gwen Sayers
Simulacra I was six when I shifted a curtain in a dark room at the waxwork museum and peered through glass at a woman I remember hooks and chains her tattered skirts pale lips crimson stains I thought of her first time I lifted black tarpaulin...
John Bowen
The Upminster Train We met on the District Line from Wimbledon to Upminster. Chatted all through Southfields. Hands held by Putney Bridge. Our first kiss at a sudden lurch near Parson’s Green. In love as we pulled in at Fulham Broadway. It was all...
Dennis Tomlinson
The Lea at Hertford Around me everything is peaceful. The river flows, willows trail in it and children walk by. Nothing of her suicide abides. Dennis Tomlinson lives in London. His poems have been published recently in Shot...