Today’s choice
Previous poems
Rebecca Cohen
Why don’t you eat pork?
If you don’t believe in God, my friend says,
why don’t you eat pork?
I have no answer for her. I have only
the blue-tacked mezuzah stuck to the doorway of my bedroom,
the dried wax still wedged in stubborn clots
on each branch of a bronze menorah,
the framed parsha, hooked onto a bent nail
crowding the far wall of my living room.
I have only the memory of a six-year-old
who sat on the floor at Ohel Leah
and hummed along to the davening,
cradling a wooden cat in her lap.
Her braided hair was longer than mine, her eyes wider.
But my mother always says, if she squints,
we share the same smile.
Rebecca Cohen is a poet based in London. Her work has appeared in West Branch, Across the Margin, and The Lincoln Review and she received her MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway, University of London.
Alan Hardy
Made a list.
A record.
The dishes she ate.
Monuments visited.
In Paris.
Susana Arrieta
Tempting death with every cobblestoned step
his face was a collection of broken records
Peter Leight
There’s more waste than we use for the things we ordinarily use waste for, such as piling it on barges and sending them out to sea, tucking it under the surface like a layer of insulation . . .
John Grey
there are some lives
lived poolside
and others that
mostly consist of
a bent back in a field –
Adam Flint
All summer automatic exits remain
open, and no one leaves or boards.
David Van-Cauter
You are pleased to see me
in my gothic T-shirt –
those bats, you say, have been your friends.
Mark Wyatt
yes of course/ it was idyllic, reclining (pint of/ cider in hand) poolside in the harvesting/ sunlight
Catherine Shonack
when confronted with vast, endlessness of the ocean
who wouldn’t go mad?
Ansuya Patel
Women scrape coins from their purse,
count pennies, one lifts up a watermelon
in mid-air like raising a newborn to light.