Today’s choice
Previous poems
Siân Bentham
Knowledge
She doesn’t know what she is doing.
She chops and boils, snacks and sneezes, sits.
Classical radio plays, imbuing
the scene with comic dignity and wit.
I close my eyes, wrapping truths in wool and
wearing them about me. To be frank is
to be cruel, they say. They misunderstand.
Kindness is crueller. It holds a promise
of rest whilst it bludgeons the likes of me,
who have suffered quietly but madly.
And all the while she does not know what she
is doing – and nor do I exactly.
Confound it all and let the cool ones go;
I am not wretched but could be less so.
Siân Bentham is originally from South-East London. She’s an copyeditor for Wasshoi!, an online magazine about Japanese culture, and recently graduated with a degree in Geography. You may well find her in the Polish section of your local supermarket.
Jena Woodhouse
Around midnight, the hour when pain
reasserts its dominance, a voice
behind the curtain screening
my bed from the next patient’s:
an intonation penetrating abstract thoughts
Kate Bailey
They’ve mended the park fence again,
patched it over with the usual ugly metalwork,
like a riot barricade.
Ibrar Sami
Across the barren land
where blood once played its savage Holi,
the fearless migratory birds
have returned again.
Anyonita Green
It wobbles slightly, red wine jelly.
I peer at it, nose close enough
to smell the iron, the scent of coagulant,
inhaling through slightly parted lips
Soledad Santana
Seen as she’d hung her cranial lantern
from the roof of her step-father’s garden shed,
the parabolic formula was skipped; like two calves, we followed the fence
to the end of the foot-ball pitch.
Claire Harnett-Mann
Behind the block, the night tears in scrub-calls.
Fox kill scores the morning,
ripped by prints in muck.
Hedy Hume
Stepping into the opposing seat
I smile, and the look I receive
Makes me feel the antisocial one.
Matthew F. Amati
Hands said to Head
look what you’ve made me do
it’s not me, Head said, talk to
Heart, that guy’s sick
Mariam Saidan
‘Female singing constitutes a ‘forbidden act’ (ḥarām),
punishable under Article 638 of the Islamic Penal Code.’