Today’s choice
Previous poems
L Kiew
Brine
I leave everything on shingle,
meet surf like a sibling,
crest over playful breakers
and chase the moon’s tail.
There was salt in my kisses.
It preserved us for a while,
resisted the putrefaction.
Skin on sea-stained sheets.
My mind’s water, the wind
changing direction over it.
With knickers around knees,
I squeeze out our last.
Cold presses stones
into cheeks. A whip of air.
Fog congests the cove,
crusts spittle onto lips.
A chinese-malaysian in London, L Kiew works as a charity leader and accountant. Her pamphlet The Unquiet was published by Offord Road Books (2019). L Kiew’s first collection More than Weeds was published by Nine Arches Press (2023). Website www.lhhkiew.co.uk
Peter Leight
There’s more waste than we use for the things we ordinarily use waste for, such as piling it on barges and sending them out to sea, tucking it under the surface like a layer of insulation . . .
John Grey
there are some lives
lived poolside
and others that
mostly consist of
a bent back in a field –
Adam Flint
All summer automatic exits remain
open, and no one leaves or boards.
David Van-Cauter
You are pleased to see me
in my gothic T-shirt –
those bats, you say, have been your friends.
Mark Wyatt
yes of course/ it was idyllic, reclining (pint of/ cider in hand) poolside in the harvesting/ sunlight
Catherine Shonack
when confronted with vast, endlessness of the ocean
who wouldn’t go mad?
Ansuya Patel
Women scrape coins from their purse,
count pennies, one lifts up a watermelon
in mid-air like raising a newborn to light.
Pippa Little
a woman’s rage cannot raise the dead
but it may split stone like lightning
Abiodun Salako
a boy grows tired
of dying again and again.
i am building him a morgue
for Thanksgiving.