Today’s choice
Previous poems
Sreeja Naskar
everything i love is out to sea
glass-tooth morning.
salt mouth.
i left the stove on just to feel wanted.
the sea wrote back once—
in lowercase.
smudged.
untranslated.
i drank it anyway.
//
the sun fell behind me like
a dog you didn’t name.
didn’t stay.
i speak in splinters now.
no full words.
just
kitchen tile
cracks in the paint
the hum of things unplugged.
the mug is chipped.
the coffee’s been cold since ’06.
conversations curdle at the rim.
nobody drinks.
everybody talks.
//
i laughed at the funeral /
no one was there /
not even me
what i mean is—
i’ve been alive too long
in the wrong tense
& no one noticed
when i folded
my joy
like laundry
& forgot it
in someone else’s drawer.
//
i saw her—
knees to her chest,
eating a poem
like stale bread
with no butter.
still said thank you.
they call it healing
when you leave the wound open
& just name it sky.
//
everything i love is out to sea.
no letters.
no flares.
just
float.
drift.
unclench.
(i keep setting the table anyway.)
Sreeja Naskar is a poet from West Bengal, India. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poems India, Modern Literature, Gone Lawn, Eunoia Review, ONE ART, among other literary journals. She believes in the quiet power of language to unearth what lingers beneath silence.
Winifred Mok, Sandra Noel, Özge Lena and Alannah Taylor for Earth Day
we groan as the mercury hikes
climbing with the ball of fire
the Hot Weather Warning surrenders its flag
feels like 40 and it’s only May Day
-Winifred Mok
where geese balance on one leg
sleeping inside themselves
until they wake for hours of sun
and swimming
-Sandra Noel
You are walking in a half empty street. Carrying a rifle, you are hunting for canned food. Sultry evening falls like an electrified blanket, leaving you breathless. The world you know is long gone. The world has already surrendered to the heat waves followed by water wars, hunger wars. And hunger is a crazy carnivore in your belly. You turn a corner to see two rifles. Pointed at you. You shoot the air calmly.
-Özge Lena
I might eat more slowly, breathe more deeply the fragrance of nettle steep, be more mindful of
the miracle of vegetables of promising colour glinting in the oil of a pan, I might grind my molars
with the thought close that their substance, too, is borrowed from the minerals of the ground
-Alannah Taylor
Cal O’Reilly
I feel the sun, its love and anger,
a baked red brick rubbed
on the back of my calves.
Hiking in a binder was a shit idea,
My lungs reach to surface, come short.
Lucy Dixcart
It Starts Before Birth
Your tadpole-self, displayed to strangers for a thumbs-up.
Then childhood illnesses, faithfully documented.
Anna Mindel Crawford
We have our eyes on the chairs, ready
for when the music stops. Nobody wants
to be in the space where a seat had been
Sue Proffitt
Sue Proffitt lives by the coast in South Devon, UK. She has an M.A. in Creative Writing and has been published in a number of magazines, anthologies and competitions. She has two poetry collections published: Open After Dark (Oversteps, 2017) and The Lock-Picker...
Daniel Rye
When did the slowness
of this afternoon
merge with the chugging
boat engine in the harbour?
Anna Ruddock
Let it be okay that it took me a while to get here
If not better then equally fine to be
the goldfinch . . .
Laura Fyfe
How do we pull ourselves back
when we’ve nothing to hold on to?
Find a way clear
or stay? Wait.
David Belcher
How to not exist
Allow yourself to be elbowed aside
become a non-person
an avoider of lingering looks