Today’s choice
Previous poems
Aardhra Chandran
Chavittu Nadakam
Canvas boots, pig-iron tacks.
At midnight, the wooden platform groans like a hull.
The raw earth shakes below the planks,
cardboard stage-sets buckling under the stride.
The Emperor wears a crown of tinsel,
his beard fixed with stinking spirit-gum.
The heel-strike splinters the cedar wood,
bruising the shin beneath the leather.
A low thrumming runs through timber long after the crowd leaves.
Cedar grain stamped into skin.
Aardhra Chandran is a poet from Kerala, India. Her work has appeared in Eunoia Review, Active Muse, The Punch Magazine, and Borderless Journal, and is forthcoming in other literary journals. Her poetry engages with material landscapes, labour, memory, and the ecological textures of place.
Alan Hardy
Made a list.
A record.
The dishes she ate.
Monuments visited.
In Paris.
Susana Arrieta
Tempting death with every cobblestoned step
his face was a collection of broken records
Peter Leight
There’s more waste than we use for the things we ordinarily use waste for, such as piling it on barges and sending them out to sea, tucking it under the surface like a layer of insulation . . .
John Grey
there are some lives
lived poolside
and others that
mostly consist of
a bent back in a field –
Adam Flint
All summer automatic exits remain
open, and no one leaves or boards.
David Van-Cauter
You are pleased to see me
in my gothic T-shirt –
those bats, you say, have been your friends.
Mark Wyatt
yes of course/ it was idyllic, reclining (pint of/ cider in hand) poolside in the harvesting/ sunlight
Catherine Shonack
when confronted with vast, endlessness of the ocean
who wouldn’t go mad?
Ansuya Patel
Women scrape coins from their purse,
count pennies, one lifts up a watermelon
in mid-air like raising a newborn to light.