Today’s choice
Previous poems
Meg Pokrass
Cat Swarm
This is what happens when she sits alone in her dining room, eating smoked trout and canned sardines. Twelve cats who are molting arrive as a sweet surprise. They smell the flavor and here they are. Now there’s cat fur everywhere. It covers her couch like a winter coat. Empty boxes of cat food line the walls of her apartment, and her adult son threatens to send her to a shelter. “No more cats, Mom,” he says, but she ignores him. “We all have less fur,” she whispers to the cats as she brushes them. Her own fur rises and floats like the fluff of a dandelion caught in the wind.
Meg Pokrass is the author of First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories (Dzanc Books, 2024) and eight previous collections of poetry and prose. Her work has appeared in RATTLE, Waxwing, One Art: A Journal of Poetry, Cottonmouth, New England Review, Plume, The Pedestal, American Journal of Poetry, Electric Literature and elsewhere. Meg lives and writes in the Scottish Highlands.
Seán Street
Dogs in spring park light
pulled by intent wet noses
through luminous grass
Becky Cherriman
What does it wake me to
as sky is hearthed by morning
and my home warms slow?
Mark Carson
he dithers round the kitchen, lifts his 12-string from her hook,
strikes a ringing rasgueado, the echo bouncing back
emphatic from the slate flags and off the marble table.
Elizabeth Worthen
This is how (I like to think) it begins:
night-time, August, the Devon cottage, where
the darkness is so complete . . .
Elly Katz
When naked with myself, I feel where a right elbow isn’t, then is. I let my left palm guide me through the exhibition of my body.
Laurence Morris
The night of his arrest I climbed a hill
to find a deep cave in which to hide
Sarp Sozdinler
As a kid, Nehisi used to sleep in a treehouse. He could curl right into it from his bedroom window. He would have a hard time falling asleep every time his parents got loud or physical.
Three poems on Counting for National Poetry Day: Max Wallis, Julie Anne Jenson, Brian Kelly
I don’t wear them
or have any
but you gave me a pair
of seven-inch goth platform heels.
Fizza Abbas
They say change is a constant,
but this constant became a coefficient
always racing to catch me