Today’s choice
Previous poems
Esha Volvoikar
Ripening
The earth cracks and we are left
with the same shared moon.
She peers through my lattice window
and hides behind your city’s smoke.
Have you ever caught her
covertly climbing the ladder,
the hoards below are distracted
watching the tangerine sun set.
In Arabic the word for moon is qamar –
قمر, where all her phases align
into gibbous – full – crescent
floating in a celestial pool.
In Urdu kamar means waist.
A full moon unfurls at her کمر,
she wanes and waxes, her hollow
empties out and sinks into her ribs.
When the darkness sets in
grey clouds dress this newborn,
she becomes one with the night
before she comes out again.
We leave this earth behind
and the blood moon rises.
Let us pluck this mandarin
and split her in half.
Esha Volvoikar was born and raised in Goa, India. She studied Creative Writing at the University of Warwick. She was shortlisted for The Thawra Poetry Competition 2024. Her poems have been published by Young Poets Network and The Alipore Post.
Nelly Bryce
Longing curls its legs up on the sofa in our house.
There’s a dip there now.
How I long to turn us into a day trip.
You belong in that chair over there
asking what happened with that text
and where I bought this jumper,
Cameron Tricker
See the local estate agent crooks
Ten a penny
Smoking their rollies, washed down with
protein
Pigeons with emerald necks
Elizabeth Osmond
Difficult doctors don’t care about their patients,
They are filling up hospitals and GP practices with their difficult bodies.
They are often late to work and shuffle into handover . . .
Jay Whittaker
. . . .We would go
to the cupboard where multi-packs
of Fine Fare’s basic crisps were sorted
into old shoe boxes, one for each child.
Kate Maxwell
I’d rather be inside
pretending I’m not
pretending commentary
inside my head
is real and here
Jim Murdoch
Some things we hold in trust,
some we forget we even own
and then there’re those items
we hang onto “just in case.”
Andrew McDonnell on Father’s Day
Somewhere to get to The light is growing in the East the headlights skim the road that runs beside the flooded fields we’re a month off blossom when it comes I will drape myself in the year’s renewal and ask how many times I will see my little...
Anna Lewis
With the neon-splashed night at the window
I counted each contraction down, obediently,
as my mother had told me to do.
Bobbie Sparrow
You ask me why
I put myself through that,
as if I jumped out of a plane
14,000 feet of fear and longing.