Today’s choice
Previous poems
Precious Ejim
Motherly misery
I don’t know why I look to my mother
for her shadow never stays.
promises are whispered
soft as fur, then shed.
I grow between hunger and shame,
guilty for wanting warmth,
from her body.
she is not cruel.
only miserable.
the kangaroo with a torn pouch
sometimes I’m carried,
sometimes I fall.
I gather my own shelter:
sticks, spit, scraps––
digging through what others discard
to make something that might hold.
then she returns, a bird
swoops low, lifts me briefly,
as if love were instinct
never permanent.
I don’t know why I look to my mother
for her shadow won’t stay.
Precious Ejim is a writer from Boston, Massachusetts. Her work explores womanhood, longing, and emotional vulnerability in contemporary life. She is interested in intimacy, interiority, and the emotional textures of being young and female.
Abiodun Salako
a boy grows tired
of dying again and again.
i am building him a morgue
for Thanksgiving.
Patrick Wright
It’s as if the dream
is telling me we are still joined
somehow, despite waking
and me trudging on, even though
your voicemail is off, your locks
changed.
William Collins
We carry the shame of Paragraph 352D
folded into suitcases at foreign borders,
where love is questioned like a crime,
and disbelief stamped heavier than visas.
They tell us to run for our lives —
but only if we can do it quietly.
Oz Hardwick
The ghost of my mother knows the names of everything, but
she can’t tell me, because ghosts, whatever you have heard
to the contrary, can’t speak.
McLord Selasi
I walk the flat barefoot,
step over old dreams
still curled like cats
in the corners.
Warren Mortimer
& you’ll understand if i leave open this theatre of air
not as the invite for another loss
but to honour their world unwilling to collapse
Jena Woodhouse
Language reinvents itself,
coruscates in signs on walls;
falls silent, mute as clay and stone
on tablets that enshrine its form.
Martin Rieser
The river is an old demon
& my heart is an infirm creature
The river is sure of its way
& my heart is capable of lies.
Sreeja Naskar
glass-tooth morning.
salt mouth.
i left the stove on just to feel wanted.