Today’s choice
Previous poems
Meg Pokrass
Cat Swarm
This is what happens when she sits alone in her dining room, eating smoked trout and canned sardines. Twelve cats who are molting arrive as a sweet surprise. They smell the flavor and here they are. Now there’s cat fur everywhere. It covers her couch like a winter coat. Empty boxes of cat food line the walls of her apartment, and her adult son threatens to send her to a shelter. “No more cats, Mom,” he says, but she ignores him. “We all have less fur,” she whispers to the cats as she brushes them. Her own fur rises and floats like the fluff of a dandelion caught in the wind.
Meg Pokrass is the author of First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories (Dzanc Books, 2024) and eight previous collections of poetry and prose. Her work has appeared in RATTLE, Waxwing, One Art: A Journal of Poetry, Cottonmouth, New England Review, Plume, The Pedestal, American Journal of Poetry, Electric Literature and elsewhere. Meg lives and writes in the Scottish Highlands.
Melanie Tibbs
People came to find out what ‘Garage Sale’ meant
in a small village landlocked county early burning comet tail
of Thatcher’s Britain.
Alfie Nawaid
a cowboy is that split second of doubt between victim
and victor, quick whipcrack out the corner of the mouth,
Stuart Rawlinson
I’m nineteen, I’m ancient.
I am so hungover
one of my eyes has fallen out…
Susie Wilson
Ceilings don’t hold water well.
Burst a pipe at the top
of an apartment block
to test this theory, if you will.
Andy Breckenridge
Abertawe After Richard Siken For CHD Tell me about the time I mansplained that Swansea is the English for Abertawe and means town at the mouth of the River Tawe. And about when, from the hill above Rhossili beach Lundy Island’s spectral mass...
Mark Wyatt
Daedalus
Plato loved his incessant questioning
of the natural world’s engineering
Sue Wallace-Shaddad
I tempt you with morsels
of soft-skinned peach, a pear sliced
in quarters, pipless and skinless.
Lesley Burt
Red-hot-pokers blazon her two world wars in flowerbeds, and in her hearth. The coalman drops odd nuggets under gaslight for neighbours to fetch in a bucket.
From the Archives: Dipo Baruwa-Etti
Seats
Before a table of white
People, I stand with ballet
Slippers strapped/soft soles
Head pointed towards the angels…