Today’s choice
Previous poems
Elaine Baker
To my Ovaries
My cahoonas. My muscular daisies.
Potent white olives. You make me sick.
My mute twins on tricycles. Femme fatales.
Relay racers. Nightmares wished upon stars.
In my brain you’re pendula on speed.
My climax on the horror film screen.
You are landmines inside me,
birth and death simultaneously,
two tickers, with all a heart’s grief,
none of its mercy. You’re mad for procreation.
You’re my future on the run.
My past gunned down in the street.
Elaine Baker is the author of poetry chapbooks: Dancing in Babylon, Winter with Eva (both V Press) and five-point-palm (Red Ceilings Press). She lives in the wilds of Norfolk. Find her on X @kitespotter, Instagram @elainebaker76 and at: www.elaine-baker.com
Sylvie Jane Lewis
Being quiet and easily tired by being alive among people, I take
the cowardly route to community. I curate a digital garden of oddity.
At best my phone is a menagerie of queers: trinket makers, amateur
playwrights, witches, and, over and over again, my own personal monarchy.
Maryam Alsaeid
Maybe after your bath—
you will sit for a moment,
the towel will hold you close
like a quiet prayer—
Steve Komarnyckyj, Anna Bowles and Lynnda Wardle for Holocaust Memorial Day
where I saw you praying through the angle of the door
Now hangs only in my mind I breathe on its glass wipe away fly specks
Annie Wright
Sing silver times, shimmering columns
of light on the wine-dark, temple
to moon-eyed Hecate, the insatiable.
Magnus McDowall
We rolled out on Seven Sisters Road,
two crates of Tyskie empty in my stairwell.
We were talking from the chest, walking backwards
crackling air above our heads like streetlights
Yucheng Tao
But look here, I turned my head
and discovered the Denver Museum
waiting,
nerve, a soft-boned
species hums
Sarah Boyd
He’s a house of cards, a delicately balanced pyramid
held together by hearing aids and dusty bifocals and
wobbling dentures and ageing pacemaker and
shirt with three buttons missing in action and
Samantha Carr
You became obsessed with nucleated red blood cells when you peeked through an
aperture window at your liquid, viscous nature. You became obsessed with maps
Helen Akers
we’re trying to construct a frame for this
‘highly reactive impulsive emotion’
the nurse is looking into it