Today’s choice
Previous poems
Afolabi Ezra
The Day Nothing Happened
It was a quiet day—
no bad news,
no sudden loss,
no reason to hold my breath.
I didn’t notice it at first,
how rare that is.
The sky stayed where it was,
the ground didn’t give way,
my phone remained silent
in the best possible way.
I drank water
without thinking about survival.
I laughed
and didn’t have to explain why.
It felt almost suspicious—
like peace was something borrowed,
something that might be taken back
if I looked at it too closely.
So I didn’t.
I let the day pass through me
unchallenged,
unquestioned—
and only later realized
it had been a gift
I almost ignored.
Afolabi Ezra
Alison Patrick
A dozen snail shells exposed on dry soil
in the archangel’s cut brown stalks.
Banded like fairground sweets and helter-skelters . . .
Julie Egdell
At the shore of impossibility
last moments come to nothing
all our plans die in the salt air
of another new day on the black sea.
Elena Chamberlain
My trans friends and I just want to go swimming
in cold water
without a thousand eyes watching.
Regina Weinert
It was the snatch of a dream,
someone said this is not
what you do in the desert,
it was one precise thing, not a list . . .
Philip Dunkerley
We leave early, drive for two and a half hours,
park, find the church where you were married.
Marc Janssen
The sky opens
Blinking its single slackened eye.
Sigune Schnabel tr. Simon Lèbe
She cut letters out of me,
which quietly and unnoticed
danced red poems.
Pat Edwards
He is in white-out, stopped in his tracks,
dying for the comfort of a fag.
He makes a chalice around the flame,
hands becoming shield so he can light up.
Pamilerin Jacob
Annette the gap-toothed,
You kissed a man & I was born. You gave him
your laughter & he built an empire,