Today’s choice

Previous poems

Clare Bryden

 

 

 

The long arc

I

seek justice
and you hold
a seashell to your ear

hear
oceans whispering limitless
sssshhh

history heaps sheering waves
shattering across reefs
sweeping shallow bays

rearing breakers
pound shelving beaches
scatter shells with razor-sharp edges

II

knowledge like coral
shelters fluid ecosystems
and fragile

when bleached and gone
none can be recouped
crocheting hyperbolic space

 

 

Clare Bryden is a writer and web developer based in Exeter, UK. Her interests are wide-ranging, but primarily the place of humanity within the natural world of which we are part, and the related theology and psychology of connectedness.
clarebryden.co.uk   @clarebryden.bsky.social

Opeyemi Oluwayomi

They are piercing knife between
the city, detaching the body from the head,
& squeezing the blood out of the flesh,
so there can be an end to what hasn’t begun.

Rhian Thomas

I sit to fumble some intrusion from my shoe.
A shard of stone, no bigger than a thought, its ridged face
cutting like some old lover, like a baby or
an old preacher drumming something that irks like a worn out song

Erwin Arroyo Pérez

Here, in my Manhattan room / insomnia tugs at me like a half-closed taxi door / letting all the echoes in
/ an ambulance carries the last breath of an asthmatic man