Today’s choice
Previous poems
Rizwan Akhtar
Love
What fell between an abrupt shower
and a sky’s attitude was your memory.
In the small presence of wind
under a tree, I stopped renovating
your image, after the silence
ploughed over, the days we spent
in front of each other, agreeing that
the well-being of lovers is not a
a subject history ever broached.
Rizwan Akhtar’s debut collection of Poems Lahore, I Am Coming (2017) is published by Punjab University Press. He works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Punjab University, Lahore, Pakistan. He completed his PhD in postcolonial literature from the University of Essex, UK in 2013. He has published poems in well-established poetry magazines of the UK, US, India, Canada, and New Zealand. He was a part of the workshop on poetry with Derek Walcott at the University of Essex in 2010.
Abu Ibrahim
When young boys go missing,
the neighbourhood rallies a search party.
We panic like a bomb’s ticking
Debs Buchan
Tish was always coming home
home with its broken bricks and scrap fires
always the smell of something burning
Rebecca Brown
She’s grateful to be alive with these tumours crackling in her bones
Alan McGuire
Going downtown was pre-drinking, save money, buy confidence.
Going downtown was queuing outside Walkabout, a drunken reality show.
Going downtown wasn’t a release, but a rite of passage.
Ryan O’Neill
Where can we go on holidays this year,and when will we get a house if you’re away for two years,and now you’re crying,and it’s £4 to park for the day . . .
Anna Vercambre
Shall we build you out of cardboard? Shall we build you out of tin cans?
Sue Johns
To keep an engine thrumming,
to perform the perfect cleft
how much strength, how many attempts?
Freya Cook, Amii Griffith and The Mollusc Dimension on our fourth and final day of our Pride Feature
Love Poem to June After Paul Monette if every window filled with light it would refract ten thousand rainbows at least twelve would hit you and if i say you are beautiful in this light you would say this is your light the only one you want to be...
Aisha Odette and Carmilla for the Third Day of our Pride Feature
Glitch
Last night
my brain dreamt
of freshly-braided hair
mine, cocoa sipped pre-bedtime
yours, morning-wet mascara…
– Aisha Odette
(un)natural
They are unfamiliar to me.
Every sand grain,
every stone,
every leaf,
every needle,
every trunk,
every path…
– Carmilla