Today’s choice
Previous poems
Anna Bowles
Airplane Mode
Nothing bad can happen on a plane.
Engine fires, earache, hijackers; but no new grief.
The heart is contained.
Cupped in the silence,
sorrow makes truce
with the green lands below.
In the regulate hum of the aircon,
the news cycle slows
to the unwrapping of dubious sandwiches,
Netflix lite and unquiet dreams.
Two hundred strangers cooped in this tube,
Each is the centre, and the compass spins
till we fold our wings under the empty sun
and tilt to the landing point.
Brace for connection. Under my fingers
the oracle rouses and seethes.
Anna Bowles started to write poetry following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and her work has been published in Magma, Orbis, The Four-Faced Liar and Poetry Salzburg. She blogs about her travels and activism at annabowles.substack.com
Molly Beale
Wanting Joy Glory be to the changeable wretch I am condemned to dance within. Spirits thumb a ride surging synapse and hurling ourselves in directionless tangles. Joy is hard. Joy must. I seek sepulchred secret caves inside guts where sin...
Prerana Kumar
LAZY ABECEDARIAN FOR SUMMER MORNING PRESERVE ROUTINE A pile of kitchen-stove kindling twists Braids with achamma’s kuttichattan hair ribbon Creasing her fingers when she crushes a twig Dew-dropping her brew for new mothers in Early morning rose-light we...
Maddy Kinkead
spiralling during Planet Earth Attenborough’s voice echoes in my head (like God) He says that we need to act now (draws us all in with baby orangutans and birds that look like aliens.) Because otherwise, no one cares. Does he know that? Current levels of...
Fred Melnyczuk
Mountain in Winter White ground, and white sky / / / And white trees, and white light. Hiking along the path of a mountain’s ridge. . . Twisted branches hang like misshapen cages; bird-prisoners sing their little laments inside / / / And it is so cold....
C.P. Nield
Intruder A rattle spikes through my ear. Tin, tin, tin. Tintinnabulation. Fingers seeking their way in – sneaking, screaking fingers, scratching at the metal, scrambling for the bolt. Ding dong. What a racket! Tin, tin, tin. I’m on the sofa blinking at...
Kitty Donnelly
High An arctic tern will fly 10,000 miles to flourish in two summers worth of light; so I was high after he died, chasing sun on the wing, though directionless. I swallowed three green capsules every night, peristalsis pulsing them through my scorched...
Oliver Sedano-Jones
We Secretly Hate You Here's our booth, come sit with us for a second. Come share this necklace with us. The vibrations here are excellent all night. Have you read Mira Kirshenbaum? That's okay. Have a sniff of this. It's meant to hurt a little. Listen:...
Kat Payne Ware
A NOTE ON PINK These things are pink: tongue; blush; intestine. Candyfloss. Ham. Flamingo. This much we know. The lotus flower is an excellent example of pink. The pink grapefruit is internally pink, but externally a warm peach. A sunrise is sometimes...
Rowena Joy Newman
winter monsoon, Bangkok, 2020 in Bangkok students amass asking after the disappeared in the shade of a banyan tree cut in half, in a diary twisting sugar with ink a seer wonders how to speak of what she has embroidered of a night world of frangipani...