Today’s choice
Previous poems
Colin Pink
Masquerade
I keep thinking I see you
across the street, hurrying along,
you’re too busy to see me.
Strange, to think of the dead being busy,
people to see, places to go, so many
appointments in the calendar of eternity.
I used to ‘see’ you when you were alive,
I mean when you weren’t there. I carry you
around like a photo in a wallet.
I’m amazed that so many people
turn out to look a bit like you,
so they can, fleetingly, masquerade as you.
It’s a good word masquerade it has just the right
number of syllables and that juicy squer sound
in the middle makes it luscious in the mouth.
You left the dance before the slow numbers;
still, the slow dances were always a bit
of a let-down, if you ask me.
Anyway, I mustn’t keep you,
just thought I’d let you know
I’ve been thinking about you.
Colin Pink co-chairs the Barnes & Chiswick Poetry Stanza. His poems have appeared in a wide range of magazines and four collections, most recently Typicity and Wreck of the Jeanne Gougy. He posts on Instagram @colinpinkpoet.
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