Today’s choice
Previous poems
Christtie Jay
Petition For The Woman Formerly Known As My Mother
My Lord, let the record show
she remembered everyone else
before this. If you must, take her
in teaspoons. Temper justice
with mercy. Let her forget
the wrong men, sharp belts, winters
with no oil in the tank, how to stretch
a pound until it weeps. Let her forget
grocery lists, swollen ankles, recipes,
how to turn salt into supper, all she gave
so I could be ungrateful. Let her forget
shame: every vowel it borrows, that house
that broke her hips, the three children
who stretched her body, deciding in month eight
our arms were no good. Let her forget the years
that folded her like linen, the plastic kindness
of nurses who call her sweetheart because
everyone forgets names. My Lord, she drank
your will like wine, wore Sundays like perfume.
I appeal, spare her the hallway that leads nowhere.
One more lucid hour where I am her
girl. Where the fog lifts for the sun to find her
face. Where she’s not holding the sky up or patient.
Christtie Jay is a storyteller whose work explores themes of memory, loss, and survival. Her writing has appeared on Prairie Schooner, BBC Radio, Lighthouse, A Long House, The Rumpus, among others. She is the author of the poetry album Grey Choir.
Rahma O. Jimoh
A bird skirts across the fence
& I rush to the window
to behold its flapping wings—
It’s been ages
since I last saw a bird.
Samuel A. Adeyemi
I can already hear the chorus of my tribe.
They want the ancient blade,
the guillotine that hovered
above my head like a halo of death.
Mofiyinfoluwa O.
when you
know that your time with someone has almost run out, that is what you do. you look for
tiny things buried in the sand so that you do not have to look at the huge broken thing
standing between you both.
Chris Emery
and if we walk to the same sea later
we’ll see something heaving up beside us:
caskets of grey, white-capped, barren and loose,
the way memories are.
T. N. Kennedy
so you collect those poems which reveal
life at its most intense and solitary
turning them on when you most need to feel
Mariah Whelan
St Ann’s Square Manchester, 23rd May 2017 Because I cannot show you what is at the centre of all this I will lay language up to its edge, walk its edges the way I moved through the back of the crowd too afraid to go in. I had to shade my eyes from...
Marissa Glover
What Might Have Been There is a small white house high on a green hill just south of Scotland, an office bright with books and a window overlooking Magdalene, and somewhere on a dirt road between endless pastures of strong red fescue, is a man on a...
Cherry Doyle
/ on the days / blood rushes at the corner of a nail / you cannot keep your jumper off the door handle / table tackles leg / expect the bruise in two days’ time / pansies nodding in speckles of rain /
Jennie E. Owen
and in that last moment
the dead shrug, shake
off their boots, shuffle off
jackets and shirts,