Today’s choice
Previous poems
Miriam Swales
STEMs
When I was 12, I knew the weight of a human head.
8 Heads in a Duffel Bag (a bit of dark comedy).
It grew from there. The curiosity. The calculations.
But, perhaps, that’s not true.
4 years before that, The Magic School Bus taught me
the pull of gravity and on which planet I’d rather live –
to be in line with the shapes around me – feminine
and, eventually, desirable. Physics was beyond …
This fed my interest in astronomy – later to be eclipsed
by chemistry. In between the two, I would stand –
back to the sun to see my frame stretch out: long legs
and hands like doughy shadows. If only.
Then came the calculations with fat – before we realised
it was all about calories. And, eventually, I wondered how
many pounds would be subtracted without one, or both,
legs. Like an animal, trapped, I chewed over the idea –
how to fit – lighten the scales. Like Venus. 91% there,
if you’re curious.
If only, like a lizard, I could pull off my limbs – bag them
in temporary storage. Or, be reborn – a rag doll severed
into a new dimension – legs first. Starting or ending there
because, of course, I couldn’t lose my head and still be me.
Miriam Swales is an American-British writer and educator living in Kent. She has been published in IS&T, was highly commended with Primers 2025 (Nine Arches Press), and was longlisted in The Rialto’s Nature and Place Competition (2026).
Kim Waters
You’re a character, a Roman numeral,
an internet meme. Descendant
from a peasant’s crook or cattle prod,
you’re the twelfth letter of the alphabet,
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