Today’s choice
Previous poems
Eve Chancellor
Kafkaesque
Imagine waking up one day and discovering
that you are a horse. At first, you might not
believe it and think you are dreaming. Gradually,
you would come to realise and go, hahaha!
Oh my god! A horse? You would look down
at this body that was not the body you went
to sleep in. All this new hair and nobody
has taught you how to shave it. Suddenly
you have difficulty getting out of bed. You try
to explain to your parents, but they won’t
put up with your whinnying. Instead, you must
get used to taking all your meals outside,
in the stables, with all the other mares who dreamt
that maybe, one day, they too could be different.
Eve Chancellor is an English Teacher in Manchester. Her poetry is featured online and in multiple anthologies, including: ‘Atrium,’ ‘Dust,’ ‘The Dawntreader’ and Ink Sweat & Tears.
Amirah Al Wassif
Beneath my armpit lives a Sinbad the size of a thumb.
His imagination feeds through an umbilical cord tied to my womb.
Now and then, people hear him speaking through a giant microphone—
Singing,
Cracking jokes,
Mark Smith
In the portacabin that morning, men smoked
and looked at last week’s paper again.
There was no water to fill the urn.
The first job – to get connected
Toby Cotton
A blustery day –
the wind too strong for kites
or for lifts to the sky.
“To a thoughtful spot,” it cites
and pins me to the earth.
Ansuya Patel
except this burnt red vase.
Hand shaped in the muffled roar,
devouring flame in the furnace’s mouth.
Hannah Ward
Look, Drew, the
plums are in
pieces beneath
us. I dreamt:
Andrea Small
a flower is not a heron
does not stand on one leg
spear-billed over golden carp
Usha Kishore
At dawn and dusk, my father
becomes a chant, that flies above
the courtyard of the old house
Jane Frank
The leaves are a colour you’ve never seen
but that I will learn to expect
and there’s a fracas-induced full moon
Clara Howell
The way a halved peach breathes, then rots
from the inside out.