Today’s choice

Previous poems

Maxine Sibihwana

 

 

 

Barbecue

here, water does not run. instead it
sits obediently in old plastic containers
here, where monkey steals avocado
when window is open, here where
white jesus hangs from the cross and
weeps into the food, where father is a tree
and mother is an oil spill,
and aunties spawn to season each dish
with gossip and the Lord’s Prayer,
and minutes are two weeks long
and the clock betrays
and the cockerel plays with the children
before its descent into charcoal and oil
fire and brimstone

 

 

Maxine Sibihwana is a London-based poet and writer from Uganda. Her work explores themes of love, shame, and questioning religious rituals, and has been published in Notebook by MUBI, Die Quieter Please, AFREADA, Lolwe and the James Currey Anthology of African Literature. Maxine was a member of the 2024 Born:Free Writers’ Collective and is on the current cohort of the Emerging Writers Programme with the London Library.

Damon Hubbs

How a Plastic Bag in an Elm Tree on Winter St. Learned to Mimic the Moon

It’s growing in what was once the tree
with the great green room.
It’s singing in yogurt
and fluttering like an amorphous pearl
of necrosis.

Cindy Botha

what shows up at dusk
 
moths of course, pale parings―
filmy, restless
dark swarf of birds homeflitting
to perch-trees
sometimes a hedgehog
nosing leaflitter
an owl wooing from the pines

Vic Pickup

Operation Alphaman

It took a great effort and I had to bite hard on the stick
to push the subcostal muscles aside.
The skin had parted easily under my knife,
though keeping the blood at bay with no one to swab the wound
was difficult. This was remedied with a vacuum cleaner