Today’s choice
Previous poems
L Kiew
Brine
I leave everything on shingle,
meet surf like a sibling,
crest over playful breakers
and chase the moon’s tail.
There was salt in my kisses.
It preserved us for a while,
resisted the putrefaction.
Skin on sea-stained sheets.
My mind’s water, the wind
changing direction over it.
With knickers around knees,
I squeeze out our last.
Cold presses stones
into cheeks. A whip of air.
Fog congests the cove,
crusts spittle onto lips.
A chinese-malaysian in London, L Kiew works as a charity leader and accountant. Her pamphlet The Unquiet was published by Offord Road Books (2019). L Kiew’s first collection More than Weeds was published by Nine Arches Press (2023). Website www.lhhkiew.co.uk
Matthew F. Amati
Hands said to Head
look what you’ve made me do
it’s not me, Head said, talk to
Heart, that guy’s sick
Mariam Saidan
‘Female singing constitutes a ‘forbidden act’ (ḥarām),
punishable under Article 638 of the Islamic Penal Code.’
Meg Pokrass
This is what happens when she sits alone in her dining room, eating smoked trout and canned sardines.
Chen-ou Liu
this fresh morning
so much like the others …
yet starlings shape-shift
Jim Paterson
A Tuesday morning in November
out on the street taking in the bins.
As a flight of crows flashed past
the street lights went out.
Andy Humphrey
Noises are louder now: the kesh
of tyres on tarmac slicked
with leaves. Rain’s drumming thunder.
Chrissie Gittins
When you’ve used one handle to open the door,
use the other handle to close it.
Morgan Harlow
She hadn’t lost a child but if she had she imagined it would be like that.
Antony Owen and Martin Figura on Remembrance Day
Let fathers bind their sons
to altars, so the wind
might winnow the chaff.