Today’s choice
Previous poems
Tamara Salih
Buried
That winter the snow kept rising,
a slow white wall climbing the windows,
each morning untouched,
the whole world muffled under it.
A hush so complete it felt like a hand
pressed gently over the mouth.
I pulled on my snow pants, my jacket.
No one home, I went outside.
Back then we wore our house keys
on shoelaces around our necks—
mine a fluorescent yellow
because I lost things.
I thought I was building an igloo,
though it was only a mound of snow
with a tunnel carved into its center.
Still, I imagined fur, seal oil,
families folded into warmth,
a fire licking the dark.
Inside my tunnel the snow leaned in,
heavy, watching through my mittens.
Sweat cooled against my wrists,
a thin film turning to ice.
For a moment I thought of resting—
the work had been hard,
the quiet so complete—
the ceiling gave way.
I took a breath.
Under that sudden weight
I wasn’t sure
I could get myself out.
Tamara Salih is a physician and writer. Her poetry has appeared in MedMic and Poet in Verse Journal. Her work explores memory, inheritance, and the body. She lives on the west coast of Canada near the Salish Sea.
Maryam Alsaeid
Maybe after your bath—
you will sit for a moment,
the towel will hold you close
like a quiet prayer—
Steve Komarnyckyj, Anna Bowles and Lynnda Wardle for Holocaust Memorial Day
where I saw you praying through the angle of the door
Now hangs only in my mind I breathe on its glass wipe away fly specks
Annie Wright
Sing silver times, shimmering columns
of light on the wine-dark, temple
to moon-eyed Hecate, the insatiable.
Magnus McDowall
We rolled out on Seven Sisters Road,
two crates of Tyskie empty in my stairwell.
We were talking from the chest, walking backwards
crackling air above our heads like streetlights
Yucheng Tao
But look here, I turned my head
and discovered the Denver Museum
waiting,
nerve, a soft-boned
species hums
Sarah Boyd
He’s a house of cards, a delicately balanced pyramid
held together by hearing aids and dusty bifocals and
wobbling dentures and ageing pacemaker and
shirt with three buttons missing in action and
Samantha Carr
You became obsessed with nucleated red blood cells when you peeked through an
aperture window at your liquid, viscous nature. You became obsessed with maps
Helen Akers
we’re trying to construct a frame for this
‘highly reactive impulsive emotion’
the nurse is looking into it
Jenny Robb
By the light of a wolf moon,
my father turns mad.
Anne whispers to a girl in the wind,
and a friend blows into my life.