Today’s choice
Previous poems
Rizwan Akhtar
Love
What fell between an abrupt shower
and a sky’s attitude was your memory.
In the small presence of wind
under a tree, I stopped renovating
your image, after the silence
ploughed over, the days we spent
in front of each other, agreeing that
the well-being of lovers is not a
a subject history ever broached.
Rizwan Akhtar’s debut collection of Poems Lahore, I Am Coming (2017) is published by Punjab University Press. He works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Punjab University, Lahore, Pakistan. He completed his PhD in postcolonial literature from the University of Essex, UK in 2013. He has published poems in well-established poetry magazines of the UK, US, India, Canada, and New Zealand. He was a part of the workshop on poetry with Derek Walcott at the University of Essex in 2010.
Sally St Clair
I’d asked for this not to be recorded;
this failure on my part, to be a good
parent;
Olivier Faivre
monkey mathematics
A monkey grabs one nut here, one nut
there, and two more over there.
He counts them with care.
HLR
I find six errors in the proofreading manual & the irony doesn’t tickle me.
I am enraged by typos, poor formatting, missing commas. This is my Big Girl Job,
the one I always wanted —
Angela Howarth Martinot
What seems to be the problem ? He asks
in that slightly condescending tone.
Seems, I think, Seems.
It seems, I say,
that I have a problem with my inner fish,
Bianca Pina
My Dad once dismissed a friend as a hypocrite,
which I took to be an induction to the truth.
Lately though, I think the things I love in you
I love because they’re grossly inconsistent.
Ian Badcoe
We are eating dessert when the urge overcomes her
to scrawl mathematics, the night ticks on
Sim Pereira-Madder
Tom Giles once asked me if I had tools and at that
time I didn’t because I was fifteen maybe sixteen
Molly Knox
I count:
four cows in the meadows. Made
friends with them this Spring.
Pascal Vine and – – – ajae – – – for our Invisible and Visible Disabilities Feature
Chronic fuck slug
Chronic floor sleeping
Chronic fist seething
Chronic food swallowing
Chronic feuding skin
Chronic foreseen surrender
Chronic failure synonym
Chronic sel(f)-inlictednes(s)
Chronic found inner-piece(s)
Chronic forcibly sending love (&) (kisse(s))
Chronic we (f)ucking mi(s)s you
– Pascal Vine
breaking through the battering lashings of exhaustion and overwhelm,
a quiet, passionate voice buds within you.
it exasperatingly sprouts and presses and pouts, saying:
“we’re forever dogged!
it’s forever dusk!
our soul’s been over-tillaged!
you’re becoming but a husk!
we need a rest
we need a break please!
our brittle bones are steeped in ache.”
– – – ajae – – –