Today’s choice
Previous poems
May Garner
The House Keeps Score
The house keeps score
in places no one checks any longer.
A hairline crack behind the fridge.
The soft dip in the hallway floor
where grief learned how to pace.
We didn’t mark the days
after you left.
We measured time by sound,
how the door stopped opening,
how the stairs forgot your weight.
There are rooms that still expect you.
They hold their breath
the way lungs do underwater.
Even now, the walls lean in,
listening for damage.
Early, I came to understand
that silence isn’t empty;
it’s crowded with what wasn’t said.
With apologies that miss their cue.
With footsteps that turn around too late.
Some nights, the house exhales.
Wood ticking like a body cooling.
I stand still, afraid to interrupt
whatever it’s remembering.
May Garner (She/Her) is an author and poet residing in rural Ohio. She has been writing for fifteen years, beginning her journey on Wattpad, and growing into a published author over the span of a decade. She is the author of two poetry collections, Withered Rising (2023) and Melancholic Muse (2025). Her work has appeared in over thirty literary presses including Querencia Press, Cozy Ink Press, Arcana Poetry Press, Livina Press, Speckled Trout Review, and other.
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.
Mofiyinfoluwa O.
when you
know that your time with someone has almost run out, that is what you do. you look for
tiny things buried in the sand so that you do not have to look at the huge broken thing
standing between you both.
Chris Emery
and if we walk to the same sea later
we’ll see something heaving up beside us:
caskets of grey, white-capped, barren and loose,
the way memories are.
T. N. Kennedy
so you collect those poems which reveal
life at its most intense and solitary
turning them on when you most need to feel
Mariah Whelan
St Ann’s Square Manchester, 23rd May 2017 Because I cannot show you what is at the centre of all this I will lay language up to its edge, walk its edges the way I moved through the back of the crowd too afraid to go in. I had to shade my eyes from...
Marissa Glover
What Might Have Been There is a small white house high on a green hill just south of Scotland, an office bright with books and a window overlooking Magdalene, and somewhere on a dirt road between endless pastures of strong red fescue, is a man on a...
Cherry Doyle
/ on the days / blood rushes at the corner of a nail / you cannot keep your jumper off the door handle / table tackles leg / expect the bruise in two days’ time / pansies nodding in speckles of rain /
Jennie E. Owen
and in that last moment
the dead shrug, shake
off their boots, shuffle off
jackets and shirts,