Today’s choice
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Meg Pokrass
Cat Swarm
This is what happens when she sits alone in her dining room, eating smoked trout and canned sardines. Twelve cats who are molting arrive as a sweet surprise. They smell the flavor and here they are. Now there’s cat fur everywhere. It covers her couch like a winter coat. Empty boxes of cat food line the walls of her apartment, and her adult son threatens to send her to a shelter. “No more cats, Mom,” he says, but she ignores him. “We all have less fur,” she whispers to the cats as she brushes them. Her own fur rises and floats like the fluff of a dandelion caught in the wind.
Meg Pokrass is the author of First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories (Dzanc Books, 2024) and eight previous collections of poetry and prose. Her work has appeared in RATTLE, Waxwing, One Art: A Journal of Poetry, Cottonmouth, New England Review, Plume, The Pedestal, American Journal of Poetry, Electric Literature and elsewhere. Meg lives and writes in the Scottish Highlands.
Tadhg Carey
When our plaything ricochets
falling
who knows where
everything hinging
on the line
Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal
I hear the roar of
the ocean. I hear
a series of shrieks
and long screams.
Natasha Gauthier
Nobody knows what Cicero’s gardener whistled
to his figs and olives, what the consul’s young wife
hummed to herself while slaves combed beeswax
and perfumed oils from Carthage into her hair.
Jean Atkin
She creeps under the opening, then stands.
Her guide passes her the stub of a candle,
holds up his own to show the ceiling rock.
Iris Anne Lewis
The track leads through thickets, threaded with eyes.
Elusive scraps of dreams, they gleam, flicker out.
Antonia Kearton
On my son’s desk lies
the periodic table of the elements.
I look. Amongst the arcane names
I recognise, easy as breathing,
carbon, oxygen, gold, beloved of kings.
Elizabeth Loudon
The first three days of war
have a surprising holiday feel.
No deadlines, just the giddy gasp of shock.
Ordinary life continues.
Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad
A lacquer table, gloss under fingertips. A raised stage with dark linen. A young woman smiles with her hand-held harp, its nine strings glistening. The room swells with the cadence of her pearly notes. Beneath the pendant lights—a vision of serenity.
Pratibha Castle
Conscience
as taught her by the nuns was a bridle
on a young girl’s tongue