Today’s choice
Previous poems
L. Haiman
O is the Mother Letter
My baby is hungry. Grabs
me with both hands. I am
an apple, apparently no will. I give in
to his teeth and hate it. Him I love! I can’t say No and even when I do
I go back
On my word. It must be that consent is
Ancient.
Older even.
A code written
In our body, a binary of unspoken NO’s / misspoken YES’s,
I guess it must have started with a
( o )
Breast.
And mouths to feed: the need
to quench and satiate an Other at the great
Expense of self. Give comfort, forfeit
Feeling safe.
L. Haiman is a Romanian-born multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Margate, UK. L. Haiman’s work explores bilingualism, cultural identity, and intergenerational trauma across concrete poetry and prose. L. Haiman’s poetry writing has appeared in West Trade Review, The William and Mary Review, and Ink Sweat & Tears and was shortlisted for the Alpine Fellowship.
Elena Chamberlain
My trans friends and I just want to go swimming
in cold water
without a thousand eyes watching.
Regina Weinert
It was the snatch of a dream,
someone said this is not
what you do in the desert,
it was one precise thing, not a list . . .
Philip Dunkerley
We leave early, drive for two and a half hours,
park, find the church where you were married.
Marc Janssen
The sky opens
Blinking its single slackened eye.
Sigune Schnabel tr. Simon Lèbe
She cut letters out of me,
which quietly and unnoticed
danced red poems.
Pat Edwards
He is in white-out, stopped in his tracks,
dying for the comfort of a fag.
He makes a chalice around the flame,
hands becoming shield so he can light up.
Pamilerin Jacob
Annette the gap-toothed,
You kissed a man & I was born. You gave him
your laughter & he built an empire,
Fatihah Quadri Eniola
There is an album of all the men
your mother have loved. It sits every
night in the deep silence of the
basement.
Nathan Evans
If they ask where I am, tell them: I am
wintering. I have secreted small acorns
of sadness in crevices of gnarled limbs
and shall be savouring their bitternesses
on the back of my tongue until the days
lengthen.