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

Scarlett Ward Bennett

    Space Two astronauts take off into space and not a single person notices the earth contract as they do so. They are birthed free from terra firma and propel themselves into orbit and perhaps mother nature is too tired to strain now so the umbilicus is...

Ella Sadie Guthrie

    Heartbreaker We are all just works in progress, muscles aching and eczema breaking skin Our minds playing tricks on us from Our last relationships. I confided this in the pub and you called me a heartbreaker, helping me eat yellow cheese off cold chips....

Steve Xerri

    The Year in Thirteen Moons i gardener's forgotten fork a pronged Excalibur locked in iron ground, round pond a mirror to the ice moon ii pollen-yellow catkin moon, a token of death loosening its grip : frost gone, sap on the move iii mass of gelatinous...

Sophia Charalambous

    Before I saw India I was a banyan tree – roots multiplying, pampered leaves. I would often sit and think about the shape of things, swastikas, shri yantras, and how many shapes are memorised and how many are inherited. I imagined the thousands of shades...

Maria-Sophia Christodoulou

    Matinal Fears I’m going to mess your life up— taping my thumb to my finger. I’m a big foot kind of bitch god, my father is scared to ask me the truth. I cannot wake from meat dreams, orange pulp fighting my maternal instinct. Let’s calm ourselves, wash...

Elaine Baker

    Haberdasher After Pascale Petit I found out where my heart is that he’s cut out with his tiny scissors. He stitched it to a t-shirt with her name on. Back in New York they spend the weekend together, wandering down avenues that all look the same. She...

June Wentland

    Migraine day Two charged wires, that shouldn’t meet, are touching and – deeply – a tenderness of bright red ulcer pulses. The sky is the colour of unrequited fights and love bites. The magpies are nervy. The weather – saw-toothed and pissed – is...

L Kiew

    Glacier I overspill the high corries where the snow accumulates, breaks down, suffers ablation. Over the decades, the millennia, ice slows and fankles due to my weight. My skin extrudes nunataks, shears away to crevasses; I extend glassy gantries over...

James McDermott

    TAMAGOTCHI the tamagotchi was   a key   chain sized egg   shaped   computer   with screen   three buttons the tamagotchis were   small aliens like me   who   had   put down   an egg   on Earth to see what life was like   the player had to raise   the...