Today’s choice
Previous poems
Precious Ejim
Motherly misery
I don’t know why I look to my mother
for her shadow never stays.
promises are whispered
soft as fur, then shed.
I grow between hunger and shame,
guilty for wanting warmth,
from her body.
she is not cruel.
only miserable.
the kangaroo with a torn pouch
sometimes I’m carried,
sometimes I fall.
I gather my own shelter:
sticks, spit, scraps––
digging through what others discard
to make something that might hold.
then she returns, a bird
swoops low, lifts me briefly,
as if love were instinct
never permanent.
I don’t know why I look to my mother
for her shadow won’t stay.
Precious Ejim is a writer from Boston, Massachusetts. Her work explores womanhood, longing, and emotional vulnerability in contemporary life. She is interested in intimacy, interiority, and the emotional textures of being young and female.
Rhian Thomas
I sit to fumble some intrusion from my shoe.
A shard of stone, no bigger than a thought, its ridged face
cutting like some old lover, like a baby or
an old preacher drumming something that irks like a worn out song
Erwin Arroyo Pérez
Here, in my Manhattan room / insomnia tugs at me like a half-closed taxi door / letting all the echoes in
/ an ambulance carries the last breath of an asthmatic man
Hannah Linden
Formed into darkness
an octopus squeezes around
the spaces of a shipwreck.
Kweku Abimbola
My father walks backwards
better than most walk forward—
so whenever he sewed his steps into the living
room carpet, I rushed to mirror my moon-
walking, until he froze,
froze like he’d been caught
by the beat.
Paul Bavister
We found our eyes first,
as they swirled through fragments
of black jumper, dark pine trees
and an orange sunset sky
Anne Donnellan
I prayed for resurrection
that the sun in the sky
might dance Easter morning.
Philip Gross
Enough of scorch, scald, sore- and rawness.
Sometimes flesh longs for eclipse.
Nick Allen
she told me about the still hours
spent at the coast watching the east
Phil Vernon
Because we were four
and I only had strength to carry one
and knew no other way
I carried the one who called out loudest;
threatened us most.