Today’s choice
Previous poems
Mana Misaghi
Mythopolitics
we make sure to pack a deck of cards for the train, or a sunday afternoon visit to the park. the cards will give our hands something tangible to do, and that thing should be as far away from
Productive as possible, for that is the purpose.
so even though we always pack a book, because we are not perfect, we make sure to also remember the cards. we will then remind ourselves, as we take out the cards, that we shall not play card games, even though we enjoy them, and they are far away enough from being Productive. we will do well to remember that they are built upon the foundation of Competitiveness, and shall therefore be avoided.
with the cards now in front of us we read each other’s fortunes.
We refer to our phones to double check the meaning of a three of diamonds or an ace of clubs. our aunties knew these by heart, but we have been plucked away from their tree and abandoned
Here.
Mana Misaghi is a London-based Iranian poet. They hold an MA in Gender Studies from Goldsmiths and a BA in English Literature from Allameh Tabataba’i University. They have translated two YA novels into Farsi, and two of their poems will appear in The Broken Spine’s upcoming slimline anthology. Instagram: @fair.creature.of.an.hour
Joseph Blythe
I swear I felt the swirly patterned paper
rip from the walls of my childhood bedroom.
It was the same stained cream shade as my skin –
pockmarked, cut and scabbed, dry and peeling…..
Denise Bundred
Shadowed boats bereft of sail
absorb the surge and slap
constrained by a blue-grey chink
of mooring chains.
Rahma O. Jimoh
A bird skirts across the fence
& I rush to the window
to behold its flapping wings—
It’s been ages
since I last saw a bird.
Samuel A. Adeyemi
I can already hear the chorus of my tribe.
They want the ancient blade,
the guillotine that hovered
above my head like a halo of death.
Mofiyinfoluwa O.
when you
know that your time with someone has almost run out, that is what you do. you look for
tiny things buried in the sand so that you do not have to look at the huge broken thing
standing between you both.
Chris Emery
and if we walk to the same sea later
we’ll see something heaving up beside us:
caskets of grey, white-capped, barren and loose,
the way memories are.
T. N. Kennedy
so you collect those poems which reveal
life at its most intense and solitary
turning them on when you most need to feel
Mariah Whelan
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