Today’s choice
Previous poems
Anyonita Green
Examining clots
It wobbles slightly, red wine jelly.
I peer at it, nose close enough
to smell the iron, the scent of coagulant,
inhaling through slightly parted lips
I imagine I can taste it, how
everything tasted metallic, like monkey
bar poles in those sweaty days of childhood,
of playgrounds, skimming stones
on the river in the gulley, our shoes caked
with Carolina red clay. There is a whole world
inside this clot — corridors and alleys
veins and cells and the unfertilised would-be
baby. My ovaries contract/release violently,
pumping out eggs, my uterus doing the work
(languidly) of nest-building, this empty red room
forced out. No baby. No walls. My panties
fill with blood. In bed, period dreams cause night
sweats, cramps demand the soothing balm
of a hot water bottle and I vacillate between
being in awe at the beautiful ruby waste
my body creates and angry that I must feel
this monthly until, without warning, my body
decides she is done making the nest, done
holding out hope for a small-faced baby, for
a man to lay and create life with.
Anyonita Green is an American immigrant living in Manchester, England. She has an MA in Poetry from MMU and enjoys writing confessional poetry and essays. Her work has appeared in Rainy City Stories and Propel. She can be found on Instagram @anyonita
Emma Lee
The instruction invites overthinking:
describe your hometown through
the medium of simple sentences
Vanessa Napolitano
I ask my father to dinner, pretending he is still alive,
ask him what he’d like. He says a pork chop which is not
something I know how to cook.
David Forrest
I don’t know why you bother with poetry Vlad mutters as he adjusts the current in the magnets, forcing them to rhyme with each other.
Neil Fulwood
Today’s operative on the ohrwurm shift
has hacked the WiFi password
in the ear canal and now I’m looping back
endlessly to a misheard lyric . . .
Ira Lightman
Laid down, his upraised face is
White – offputting – on a plumped pillow.
Dave Wynne-Jones
“The all-consuming passion
is rarely found
more than a recipe
for misery,”
you read
Pat Edwards
He appears like a paper bag blown onto the feeder,
punching his beak time and again into the peanuts.
Kate Noakes
If you follow faerie lights
that wisp where boardwalk
becomes trackway, make sure
you’re stocked with milk,
or bread and salt.
Gopal Lahiri
My father stitched an evening with current ripples
spill over rocks and shadows gather at the corner,