Today’s choice
Previous poems
Eve Chancellor
Kafkaesque
Imagine waking up one day and discovering
that you are a horse. At first, you might not
believe it and think you are dreaming. Gradually,
you would come to realise and go, hahaha!
Oh my god! A horse? You would look down
at this body that was not the body you went
to sleep in. All this new hair and nobody
has taught you how to shave it. Suddenly
you have difficulty getting out of bed. You try
to explain to your parents, but they won’t
put up with your whinnying. Instead, you must
get used to taking all your meals outside,
in the stables, with all the other mares who dreamt
that maybe, one day, they too could be different.
Eve Chancellor is an English Teacher in Manchester. Her poetry is featured online and in multiple anthologies, including: ‘Atrium,’ ‘Dust,’ ‘The Dawntreader’ and Ink Sweat & Tears.
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.’
Meg Pokrass
This is what happens when she sits alone in her dining room, eating smoked trout and canned sardines.
Chen-ou Liu
this fresh morning
so much like the others …
yet starlings shape-shift
Jim Paterson
A Tuesday morning in November
out on the street taking in the bins.
As a flight of crows flashed past
the street lights went out.
Andy Humphrey
Noises are louder now: the kesh
of tyres on tarmac slicked
with leaves. Rain’s drumming thunder.