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.
Regina Weinert
It was the snatch of a dream,
someone said this is not
what you do in the desert,
it was one precise thing, not a list . . .
Philip Dunkerley
We leave early, drive for two and a half hours,
park, find the church where you were married.
Marc Janssen
The sky opens
Blinking its single slackened eye.
Sigune Schnabel tr. Simon Lèbe
She cut letters out of me,
which quietly and unnoticed
danced red poems.
Pat Edwards
He is in white-out, stopped in his tracks,
dying for the comfort of a fag.
He makes a chalice around the flame,
hands becoming shield so he can light up.
Pamilerin Jacob
Annette the gap-toothed,
You kissed a man & I was born. You gave him
your laughter & he built an empire,
Fatihah Quadri Eniola
There is an album of all the men
your mother have loved. It sits every
night in the deep silence of the
basement.
Nathan Evans
If they ask where I am, tell them: I am
wintering. I have secreted small acorns
of sadness in crevices of gnarled limbs
and shall be savouring their bitternesses
on the back of my tongue until the days
lengthen.
Jim Ferguson
we can travel anywhere
she winks, but let’s rest here
in amongst these words
a moment can take a while