Today’s choice
Previous poems
Annah Atane
Bloody September
Boko Haram fighters staged gun and suicide bomb
attacks on a military camp outside the University
of Maiduguri in Nigeria’s northeastern Borno state
~ TheDefensePost
That night,
the stars had slept. The wind
silent as something dying.
I stood in the marrow of my
dread, waiting.
I had seen this before. The earth
shredding in the sober
year of 2014.
The soldiers had told us to
lie flat on the concrete, and
cup our hands for God.
I pleaded for grace, it’s flair
of swiftness to escape my sins.
The girl beside me ruffled her phone,
she beckons on home.
And this is how a mother
in her slouching chair,
finds her child dangling
in the teeth of prophecy—
returning home in a box.
I, in the midst of all the
screams and gunfire
busted with saltwater and insanity.
I remember the days
when it was all firecrackers.
Annah Atane is a Nigerian writer. She has been long-listed for the Bridgette Poirson Prize for literature and is a 2024 Voodoonauts and 2025 Sprinng fellow. Her works have appeared in the Brittle Paper, The menniscus, The Muse journal, Valiant Scribe, The Kalahari Review, Ric Journal and elsewhere.
Ben
When she said ‘could’, it was clearly in italics
and when she said ‘one day’, the creak of glaciers
shuddered around its edges.
Dragana Lazici
the days are long but the years are short.
seconds are tiny kitchen knives in my back.
i stopped reading Dickinson, her voice is a sad parrot.
Abigail Ottley
Faces, unless they come swimming up close. are a blur of piggy-pink and ice-
cream. In the street, she doesn’t know, cannot be certain when to smile, when to
look away
Maggie Mackay
The teacher is an old spindly man. Grim, out of a Grimm’s tale. Scarecrow hair, thinning. Unsmiling.
Natasha Gauthier
The tawny clutch appeared
on high-heeled evenings only,
slept in a nest of white tissue.
Romy Morreo
She only speaks to me these days
through groaning floorboards in the night
and slammed doors.
Emma Simon
No-one has seen a ghost while breast-feeding
despite the unearthly hours, the half-light
mad sing-song routines of rocking a child
back to sleep.
Kushal Poddar
The furniture covered in once
transparent now foggy sheets
craft the room a morgue, and we
identity the bodies
Erich von Hungen
And the yellow moths
like some strange throw-away
tissues used up by nature
circle the lamp hanging above.