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
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.
Sarah Nabarro
Your smile
Woke something –
Up.
If you knew,
Mike Wilson
My reptilian brain calculates the minimum I’ll do to escape
the weight of obligation …
but before I finish the math, we regress into college kids
rushing the street Julia barricades with furniture
to keep out the law by breaking the law.
Allyson Dowling
Night drops by
In a coat of onyx and blue
Lights up his silver pipe
And asks how do you do…
Emily Veal
boudicca you’re a brewery down the road i drank a bottle of your finest on the train back from bury st edmunds the red queen (no one will call you ginger) i see you everywhere realised you were also the wetherspoons round the corner the one with...
Lesley Burt
tongue it various from burr to babel swish to swirl
rushes between buttresses plaits threads of currents
where swans lord-and-lady-it along the centre
trips over own flow with
fish-out-of-water flash salmon’s silver high-jump
Sam Szanto
This love was. Slowly it becomes formless,
drifting, softening, snakeskin-empty,
the part it has played in who I am now
secreted in a pocket of a coat
Ma Yongbo 马永波 and Helen Pletts on World Poetry Day
When you enter mountains, afternoons stretch
and lengthen like days; mesmerise.
下午进山的人都会多活上一天
他们从这山望着更高的山
搓着通红的大手望山气变化
Bel Wallace
Trespasses Forgive me The E flat on your baby grand (not quite in tune). This same finger in the crack that goes clean through the bungalow’s supporting wall. Then flicking dust from the fringed edge of your floral lampshade. Noticing that they...