Today’s choice
Previous poems
Yucheng Tao
Blood and Ash
But look here, I turned my head
and discovered the Denver Museum
waiting,
a ghost that stood out in my sight,
telling me that their land was spring—
grass above flowers.
Today, they lay in an Indian exhibition,
silent；
Their faces were a sentence:
to strip them of survival
was as simple as pulling out corn.
The natives of the Arapaho
like me, watched how blood spread,
crossing
from the past into the present,
toward some corner of the world
where an unjust war burned,
buried under black moonlight
by fire.
Their bones could not be read,
as their remains were covered
under the ash of death,
silent,
floating like a ghost.
Denver’s rain is absent,
but rocks are red, like their blood.
The people of the city forget
as quickly as fish,
and sleep as deeply as rocks.
Yucheng Tao is a Chinese poet whose work has appeared in White Wall Review (Canada), Wild Court (King’s College London), Strange Horizons, NonBinary Review, Recours au Poème, and he is forthcoming in I-70 Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Poésie Première, and Arpa Poésie (2026). He received an honorary award from the Dark Poet Club, and his chapbook is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.
Julian Dobson
Street after street, ears bright to bass and tune
of two thudding feet, gradients of breathing. But rain
is brooding. Sparse headlights, ambient drone
of cars kissing tarmac, merging
Oliver Comins
Working the land on good days, after Easter,
people would hear the breaks occur at school,
children calling as they ran into the playground,
familiar skipping rhymes rising from the babble.
George Turner
Some days, the privilege of living isn’t enough.
The weight of the kettle is unbearable. You leave the teabag
forlorn in the mug, unpoured.
Craig Dobson
Slowly, ordinarily, the unimaginable happens,
lowering the past into the dark,
covering it.
Clive Donovan
If I were a ghost
I think I would shrink
and perch on wooden poles
and deco shades – get a good view
of what I am supposed to be haunting
Rose Ramsden
We left the play early. It was the last day before the start of secondary school. Dad told me off for slapping the seats
Seán Street
There was a time when I took my radio
into the night wood and tuned its pyracantha
needle along the dial through noise jungles
to silent darkness at the waveband’s end.
J.S. Dorothy
Find yourself by the lake,
its icy membrane split by the long
arrow of a skein, reflected
flurry of wings, cries
bawling.
Sarah Rowland Jones
The terns lift as one
from the salt-pools behind the beach
– a thick undulating line