Today’s choice
Previous poems
Natasha Gauthier
Roman curses
Nobody knows what Cicero’s gardener whistled
to his figs and olives, what the consul’s young wife
hummed to herself while slaves combed beeswax
and perfumed oils from Carthage into her hair.
Did bawdy odes to Octavia’s backside
(Ah, Maximus, she is plump as an Iberian mare)
flow from the taverns Ostia, Massilia, Aquae Sulis?
The Romans, leaving behind no music,
choked their sacred springs with curses.
Tiny, jagged metal tongues folded over
and over upon themselves, rolled over
and over like olive pits in vinegar mouths.
Oh goddess, may the thief who stole
my best gloves lose his mind and his eyes.
Minerva sighs at these razorblade grievances,
sulfurous prayers etched in bile, she is bored,
would prefer to be getting songs about figs,
olives, emperors, Octavia’s ample bottom,
instead of junkmail grudges piling up,
centuries-deep, at her patient doorstep
Natasha Gauthier is a Canadian poet living in Cardiff. She won First Prize in the 2024-25 Poetry Wales Awards, and won the 2025 Borzello Trust/New Welsh Review Prize for poetry. Her debut collection will be published by Parthian next year.
Maxine Sibihwana
here, water does not run. instead it
sits obediently in old plastic containers
Lesley Curwen
Her feet snagged in a cleverly-placed net
my sister waits for him to untangle her,
to hold her head still between thick fingers . . .
From the Archives: In Memory of Jean Cardy
Denizens Mice live in the London Tube. A train leaves and small pieces of sooty black detach themselves from the sooty black walls and forage for crumbs in the rubbish under the rails that are death to man. You can’t see their feet move. They...
Tina Cole
Mr. Pig modelling his best Sunday suit of farmyard smells,
flees from the cook’s cleaver to find himself a sow.
Ellora Sutton
My heart is breaking, so I’m setting up my new Wonder Oven.
The waft of toxicity as I run it on empty for ten minutes
is a welcome distraction.
Erin Poppy Koronis
Naked feet rush
over cold pebbles,
phone-torches light
our pathway to the sea.
Bob King
The first wristwatch was first worn
in 1810, despite what old turn-it-up
Flintstones episodes might have you
believe.
Brandon Arnold
Alone, I drive along the midnight, winter road. My left hand at the 12 o’clock position of the steering wheel. And I coast. I let out the day’s long breath, which started out today as a sigh.
Steph Ellen Feeney
My mother is here, and might not have been,
so I hold things tighter:
the small-getting-smaller of her
running with my daughter down the beach . . .