Today’s choice

Previous poems

Aardhra Chandran

 

 

 

Chavittu Nadakam

Canvas boots, pig-iron tacks.
At midnight, the wooden platform groans like a hull.
The raw earth shakes below the planks,
cardboard stage-sets buckling under the stride.

The Emperor wears a crown of tinsel,
his beard fixed with stinking spirit-gum.

The heel-strike splinters the cedar wood,
bruising the shin beneath the leather.

A low thrumming runs through timber long after the crowd leaves.
Cedar grain stamped into skin.

 

 

Aardhra Chandran is a poet from Kerala, India. Her work has appeared in Eunoia Review, Active Muse, The Punch Magazine, and Borderless Journal, and is forthcoming in other literary journals. Her poetry engages with material landscapes, labour, memory, and the ecological textures of place.

Annie Kissack

      Girl Awaits the Psychic Investigators They’re late. The table is laid with a clean cloth, all normal and neat. Our visitors, city men, may find it hard to navigate the path but we can wait. They hope to gather evidence of a haunting; whether he’ll...

Phil Vernon

These hills that look towards both weald and waves
hold – in their homesteads, fenced and open land,
trackways and contours – all that’s happened here

Oenone Thomas

Because I don’t know any other way

I replace my left hand
with a hook, my feet
with jackhammers, both
my eyes with spangled
mirror balls.