Today’s choice
Previous poems
Erwin Arroyo Pérez
New York City at night
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 / a few blocks away, a party spills over the rim of a rooftop / champagne fizz bleeding onto fire escapes / a wasted man howls into an empty alley / a tourist family dreams in postcard colours / a night-owl jogger runs in sports gear / three floors down, a man folds his infidelity into cheap hotel sheets / across the street, a college student—eyes hollow—types his assignment on a bioluminescent screen / not far, an orgy unfurls its limbs in the unseen crevices of a clandestine club / the first cry of a newborn ricochets throughout a hospital and fuses with the clamor of the street / somewhere, a woman pisses on a plastic stick and learns she is pregnant / and the city is pregnant too / with cosmopolitan offspring that breathe among the skyscrapers / within the lungs of New York City’s crowded womb.
Erwin Arroyo Pérez is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief at The Poetry Lighthouse. He also teaches literature and works as a translator in Paris. He holds a Master’s degree in English Literature and Linguistics from Université Paris Nanterre and King’s College London. Erwin’s poetry has been published in Paloma Press, The Nature of Our Times, The Winged Moon, Wildscape journal, Respublica Politics, Nanterre University Press, Des Nouvelles Heloise, and other American, British and French literary magazines. thepoetrylighthouse.com
Caleb Parkin
Nature Is Healing
It constructs membranes
between its most powerful organs,
filters pathogens hidden in boats.
Sue Butler
When I read my poem about stretch marks
you said it was a funny thing
to write about. I felt a flare,
low down, an orange hazed ember
you’d have to blow into life.
Susan Darlington
. . . On the edge
of sleep it comes snuffling
through leaf litter and we forget
bed; the cold prickling
our bones.
Dechen Shaw
Monks spend days shaping mandalas
with coloured sand in intricate lines
as an offering, then blow them away.
Andrew Cannon
Wait, I’m talking.
It’s my turn.
Be patient.
It takes me a while.
I have to work it out.
Rhian Parker, Madailín Burnhope and mithago on Trans Day of Visibility
Your focused eyes on a box of plantain.
Deep concentration making them filled
more brown than white.
A different mouth asks if they sell iru.
-Rhian Parker
My cockatiel, Pippin, has learned to listen
for that particular resigned sigh of the bus
as it passes the living room window
and shrieks whenever he hears it.
-Madailín Burnhope
you wanna know if it screams like a man or a girl?
i want to rip a throat out
teeth bared
growling
guttural
it builds in the back of my throat
i scream like an animal
sick of losing siblings
-mithago
Chloe Hanks
the feminine urge to bleed
all over the bedsheets, to refuse
to grow his babies, to abandon your
responsibilities, to forget to buy his toothpaste,
to move everything on his desk an inch to the left,
Avaughan Watkins
and waves jumped like giddy children
onto the stones.
Jellyfish loomed, a cove of beached moons.
You stood in your room for hours
a rock pool
waiting for the sea to hold you
Maggie Mackay
Daddy’s girl, always. Tea done, you fetch Glen’s lead and we climb the hill to the spread of The Links. We talk. It’s as if we have met in a previous life, the click – you, a pipe smoking fan of Bertrand Russell, always think, think, and think the eternal puzzles of existence. Our walks are adventures in language, in invention, a form of The Great Egg Race without eggs.