Today’s choice
Previous poems
Annah Atane
Bloody September
Boko Haram fighters staged gun and suicide bomb
attacks on a military camp outside the University
of Maiduguri in Nigeria’s northeastern Borno state
~ TheDefensePost
That night,
the stars had slept. The wind
silent as something dying.
I stood in the marrow of my
dread, waiting.
I had seen this before. The earth
shredding in the sober
year of 2014.
The soldiers had told us to
lie flat on the concrete, and
cup our hands for God.
I pleaded for grace, it’s flair
of swiftness to escape my sins.
The girl beside me ruffled her phone,
she beckons on home.
And this is how a mother
in her slouching chair,
finds her child dangling
in the teeth of prophecy—
returning home in a box.
I, in the midst of all the
screams and gunfire
busted with saltwater and insanity.
I remember the days
when it was all firecrackers.
Annah Atane is a Nigerian writer. She has been long-listed for the Bridgette Poirson Prize for literature and is a 2024 Voodoonauts and 2025 Sprinng fellow. Her works have appeared in the Brittle Paper, The menniscus, The Muse journal, Valiant Scribe, The Kalahari Review, Ric Journal and elsewhere.
Emily A. Taylor
I move my hand long
so yours will follow, and though
this moment tastes of tequila soda
paracetamol pillowed on a fizzing tongue
amnesia… pull me in anyway.
Steph Morris
No way would they let him keep that tag. They saw
a boy they must rename, must mark
from them, a boy whose limbs folded far too gently,
Eryn McDonald
It is here that the day breaks apart
Like ice on frustrated frozen pond
Here in the grounds of Ashton Court
I wish to bury myself amongst the green
Gordan Struić
Outside,
the city slides by,
blurred lines
of glass and rain.
Stephen Keeler
The days were huge and kind
and sometimes after school
we’d buy a bag of broken biscuits
for the long walk home
across the heavy heat of afternoon
on lucky days she wouldn’t take
the pennies offered up in supplication
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.