Today’s choice
Previous poems
Elijah MacBean
My Name is My Name
Ami never let anyone call my sister Sam –
it always had to be Samina.
She said she’d rather be waterboarded
than let her daughter be whitewashed
by whites too conservative to spare
the extra syllables.
Ami never let anyone call me Eli –
it always had to be Elijah.
She said she loved bursting bubbles
of Baby Boomers who thought
Elijah was reserved for blonde-haired boys
with crosses around their necks.
Ami never let anyone misspell our surname –
it always had to be MacBean.
She said the A tethered me,
to my father’s Scottish side,
steady between his body beneath,
and his spirit above.
Elijah MacBean is a mixed-race British Kashmiri-Scottish writer from Accrington, Lancashire.
Miriam Swales
When I was 12, I knew the weight of a human head.
8 Heads in a Duffel Bag (a bit of dark comedy).
It grew from there. The curiosity. The calculations.
Alison Pritchard
By what rough science
were you given
this migraine of a name
Matt Gilbert
Disgust springs up from the guts
to meet a sprinting lump
of furry muscle.
Kathleen Bryson
I am the dreaming herpetogaster chimera and
I am part-and-parcel of the impossible animals project.
Scott Lilley
I’ve seen dozens of you about the Fylde,
face all vape, fatigue, some wild sense of
beard, black hair to border it all.
Rich Yates
The bird
crept up on him, threw its voice into an empty tree
Annie Kissack
Girl Awaits the Psychic Investigators They’re late. The table is laid with a clean cloth, all normal and neat. Our visitors, city men, may find it hard to navigate the path but we can wait. They hope to gather evidence of a haunting; whether he’ll...
Jim Murdoch
We don’t decide who we love.
Who we hate, yes,
who we’re jealous of,
but never who we end up loving.
Alex Stolis
It’s 16 below zero. Actual temp. We’re sole owners of the shore, windchill pushes it down to minus 36.