Today’s choice
Previous poems
Siân Bentham
Knowledge
She doesn’t know what she is doing.
She chops and boils, snacks and sneezes, sits.
Classical radio plays, imbuing
the scene with comic dignity and wit.
I close my eyes, wrapping truths in wool and
wearing them about me. To be frank is
to be cruel, they say. They misunderstand.
Kindness is crueller. It holds a promise
of rest whilst it bludgeons the likes of me,
who have suffered quietly but madly.
And all the while she does not know what she
is doing – and nor do I exactly.
Confound it all and let the cool ones go;
I am not wretched but could be less so.
Siân Bentham is originally from South-East London. She’s an copyeditor for Wasshoi!, an online magazine about Japanese culture, and recently graduated with a degree in Geography. You may well find her in the Polish section of your local supermarket.
Erwin Arroyo Pérez
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
Hannah Linden
Formed into darkness
an octopus squeezes around
the spaces of a shipwreck.
Kweku Abimbola
My father walks backwards
better than most walk forward—
so whenever he sewed his steps into the living
room carpet, I rushed to mirror my moon-
walking, until he froze,
froze like he’d been caught
by the beat.
Paul Bavister
We found our eyes first,
as they swirled through fragments
of black jumper, dark pine trees
and an orange sunset sky
Anne Donnellan
I prayed for resurrection
that the sun in the sky
might dance Easter morning.
Philip Gross
Enough of scorch, scald, sore- and rawness.
Sometimes flesh longs for eclipse.
Nick Allen
she told me about the still hours
spent at the coast watching the east
Phil Vernon
Because we were four
and I only had strength to carry one
and knew no other way
I carried the one who called out loudest;
threatened us most.
Patrick Deeley
As you rummage of a morning
among dust-furred personal effects
jumbled in an old
wooden suitcase under a bed . . .