Today’s choice
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Amirah Al Wassif
A Thumb-Sized Sinbad under My Armpit
Beneath my armpit lives a Sinbad the size of a thumb.
His imagination feeds through an umbilical cord tied to my womb.
Now and then, people hear him speaking through a giant microphone—
Singing,
Cracking jokes,
Laughing like mad,
And impersonating a lonely banana suddenly abandoned by its peel.
The men of our town have no idea I carry a Sinbad inside me.
They say, “A woman—formed from a crooked rib.”
They say, “A woman—waiting for Prince Charming.”
But Sinbad stirs within me like a fetus,
Restless, chasing after adventure.
My aunt pinches my knee
For slipping into daydreams.
The good girls say yes.
But what about no?
What about what Sinbad tells me every night?
No one knows.
No one cares.
Amirah Al Wassif is an award-winning published poet. Her collections include For Those Who Don’t Know Chocolate (Poetic Justice Books & arts, 2019), How to Bury a Curious Girl (Bedazzled Ink Publishing Company, 2022), and her most recent work, The Rules of Blind Obedience (December 2024). She is also the author of the illustrated children’s book, The Cocoa Boy and Other Stories (2020)
Paul Short
Sleep.
Elusive as lucid dreams.
Closed eyes teem wotsit-orange,
spiderweb scarlet &
thatch-brown
Ash Bowden
Out again with the pitchfork churning
compost into the old green bin, stinking
and silent as an ancient earthen vat.
Mallika Bhaumik
This is not a frilly, mushy love letter
to a city whose allure lies in defying all labels and holding the mystery key to a man’s heart, though none has ever been able to lay an absolute claim on it,
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.