Today’s choice
Previous poems
Mana Misaghi
Mythopolitics
we make sure to pack a deck of cards for the train, or a sunday afternoon visit to the park. the cards will give our hands something tangible to do, and that thing should be as far away from
Productive as possible, for that is the purpose.
so even though we always pack a book, because we are not perfect, we make sure to also remember the cards. we will then remind ourselves, as we take out the cards, that we shall not play card games, even though we enjoy them, and they are far away enough from being Productive. we will do well to remember that they are built upon the foundation of Competitiveness, and shall therefore be avoided.
with the cards now in front of us we read each other’s fortunes.
We refer to our phones to double check the meaning of a three of diamonds or an ace of clubs. our aunties knew these by heart, but we have been plucked away from their tree and abandoned
Here.
Mana Misaghi is a London-based Iranian poet. They hold an MA in Gender Studies from Goldsmiths and a BA in English Literature from Allameh Tabataba’i University. They have translated two YA novels into Farsi, and two of their poems will appear in The Broken Spine’s upcoming slimline anthology. Instagram: @fair.creature.of.an.hour
Gordon Scapens
Stripping wallpaper
leaves naked the scrawls
of yesteryear’s children,
small forecasts of flights
that are inevitable.
Chrissy Banks and Antony Owen (from the IS&T archives) for Holocaust Memorial Day
Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep Goodnight moon, goodnight stars, goodnight cherry, pear, apple tree. Goodnight pond, stop wriggling, newts, stop zipping the water, water-boatmen. Goodnight, glossy horses on the hill, rabbits in the field, white...
Clare Bryden
how do I begin?
Yvonne Baker
an etherial whiteness
that covers and disguises
as a strip of white frosted glass
Hilary Thompson
Ambling up North Street
on a Saturday afternoon
at the end of a long Winter,
I am stopped by two women
Irene Cunningham
Lavender seeps. I expect my limbs to leaden, lead the body down through sheet, mattress-cover, into the machinery of sleep where other lives exist.
Graham Clifford
The Still Face Experiment
You must have seen that Youtube clip
where a mother lets her face go dead.
Her toddler carries on burbling for twenty to thirty seconds until she realises there is nothing coming back to her.
Susan Jane Sims
After you died,
someone asked:
What was it like
in those final sixteen days
waiting for your son to die?
Jane Frank
I imagine returning to the house.
Furniture is piled up in the rain—
the ideas that won’t fit.