Today’s choice
Previous poems
Violeta Zlatareva
Money for Candles
The neighbor is a devout woman.
She bakes bread and lights candles,
scolds the noisy children of others,
and dresses in modest clothes.
Everyone in the building fears her.
They believe she can see through skin.
Let someone lie or even laugh,
and she immediately marks them as wicked.
The other day, by the lamp post across the street,
old man Gosho fell—indecently drunk.
And our dear, righteous neighbor
quietly slipped a few dollars from his pocket.
Violeta Zlatareva is a Bulgarian writer and poet. Her books include Whale Academy and Register Misfortunes. Her work has appeared in print and digital anthologies. Her debut novel, Zdr, ko pr?, is forthcoming.
Jo Farrant
We’re stuck on a scene, frozen, like the ice cubes I begged Mum to get with the little flowers in them. Like taking a test in the school gym but your knees are so big they’re banging into the desk.
Douglas K Currier
Afternoon hangs in the air, and the birds leave.
Frogs begin to talk to each other, and the heat congeals.
Stephen Chappell
If you could call that friend,
the special one,
the one you always love and know loves you
Marius Grose
Until the dead, sucked from leaf mould graves
are rising in forest sap, to make connections
inside strange green brains
Andrew Keyman
a day later you’re in l.a. picking out cars with the magic
only money can buy
Chrissy Banks
So many times I walked
head down half asleep
along that ordinary road to school
Christopher M James
She’d had the two of us, had learnt
how children bury their riddles, how love
unearths them
Opeyemi Oluwayomi
They are piercing knife between
the city, detaching the body from the head,
& squeezing the blood out of the flesh,
so there can be an end to what hasn’t begun.
Rhian Thomas
I sit to fumble some intrusion from my shoe.
A shard of stone, no bigger than a thought, its ridged face
cutting like some old lover, like a baby or
an old preacher drumming something that irks like a worn out song