Today’s choice
Previous poems
Ashia Mirza
Heartbust: (Plato’s Allegory of the Cave)
Someone is taking a photo
at a wedding
of their baby
at a celebration.
There’s a roar of a truck
the hiss of a missile
the boom of a dumb bomb.
The prodigal sun casts shadows in your cave
of
someone taking a photo
at a wedding
of their baby
at a celebration.
There’s a roar of a truck
the hiss of a missile
the boom of a dumb bomb –
breaking your shackles.
You leave the cave blinded
scrambling over
broken lines … broken bones … broken dreams.
Your eyes switch channels.
There’s a dread it’s real.
You swipe up.
There’s a dread it’s real.
There’s a feeling beyond helpless
which you can’t stop: Heartbust.
You gasp for air
like you’re the one trapped
in the rubble
dying to get out.
You return to your shackles
in the cave watching
someone taking a photo
at a wedding
of their baby
at a celebration.
Ashia Mirza is a writer from Bolton. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Aurora Prize and highly commended by the University of Greater Manchester. Her short fiction has been shortlisted for the HG Wells Prize and published in the anthology Motion and on CafeLit. Her novels have been longlisted and shortlisted in competitions run by The Times/Chicken House, Guppy, Northern Writers, and Commonword. Alongside her writing, she works as an informatics pharmacist.
Sylvie Jane Lewis
Being quiet and easily tired by being alive among people, I take
the cowardly route to community. I curate a digital garden of oddity.
At best my phone is a menagerie of queers: trinket makers, amateur
playwrights, witches, and, over and over again, my own personal monarchy.
Maryam Alsaeid
Maybe after your bath—
you will sit for a moment,
the towel will hold you close
like a quiet prayer—
Steve Komarnyckyj, Anna Bowles and Lynnda Wardle for Holocaust Memorial Day
where I saw you praying through the angle of the door
Now hangs only in my mind I breathe on its glass wipe away fly specks
Annie Wright
Sing silver times, shimmering columns
of light on the wine-dark, temple
to moon-eyed Hecate, the insatiable.
Magnus McDowall
We rolled out on Seven Sisters Road,
two crates of Tyskie empty in my stairwell.
We were talking from the chest, walking backwards
crackling air above our heads like streetlights
Yucheng Tao
But look here, I turned my head
and discovered the Denver Museum
waiting,
nerve, a soft-boned
species hums
Sarah Boyd
He’s a house of cards, a delicately balanced pyramid
held together by hearing aids and dusty bifocals and
wobbling dentures and ageing pacemaker and
shirt with three buttons missing in action and
Samantha Carr
You became obsessed with nucleated red blood cells when you peeked through an
aperture window at your liquid, viscous nature. You became obsessed with maps
Helen Akers
we’re trying to construct a frame for this
‘highly reactive impulsive emotion’
the nurse is looking into it