Today’s choice
Previous poems
Yucheng Tao
Blood and Ash
But look here, I turned my head
and discovered the Denver Museum
waiting,
a ghost that stood out in my sight,
telling me that their land was spring—
grass above flowers.
Today, they lay in an Indian exhibition,
silent；
Their faces were a sentence:
to strip them of survival
was as simple as pulling out corn.
The natives of the Arapaho
like me, watched how blood spread,
crossing
from the past into the present,
toward some corner of the world
where an unjust war burned,
buried under black moonlight
by fire.
Their bones could not be read,
as their remains were covered
under the ash of death,
silent,
floating like a ghost.
Denver’s rain is absent,
but rocks are red, like their blood.
The people of the city forget
as quickly as fish,
and sleep as deeply as rocks.
Yucheng Tao is a Chinese poet whose work has appeared in White Wall Review (Canada), Wild Court (King’s College London), Strange Horizons, NonBinary Review, Recours au Poème, and he is forthcoming in I-70 Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Poésie Première, and Arpa Poésie (2026). He received an honorary award from the Dark Poet Club, and his chapbook is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.
Mallika Bhaumik
This is not a frilly, mushy love letter
to a city whose allure lies in defying all labels and holding the mystery key to a man’s heart, though none has ever been able to lay an absolute claim on it,
Jena Woodhouse
Around midnight, the hour when pain
reasserts its dominance, a voice
behind the curtain screening
my bed from the next patient’s:
an intonation penetrating abstract thoughts
Kate Bailey
They’ve mended the park fence again,
patched it over with the usual ugly metalwork,
like a riot barricade.
Ibrar Sami
Across the barren land
where blood once played its savage Holi,
the fearless migratory birds
have returned again.
Anyonita Green
It wobbles slightly, red wine jelly.
I peer at it, nose close enough
to smell the iron, the scent of coagulant,
inhaling through slightly parted lips
Soledad Santana
Seen as she’d hung her cranial lantern
from the roof of her step-father’s garden shed,
the parabolic formula was skipped; like two calves, we followed the fence
to the end of the foot-ball pitch.
Claire Harnett-Mann
Behind the block, the night tears in scrub-calls.
Fox kill scores the morning,
ripped by prints in muck.
Hedy Hume
Stepping into the opposing seat
I smile, and the look I receive
Makes me feel the antisocial one.
Matthew F. Amati
Hands said to Head
look what you’ve made me do
it’s not me, Head said, talk to
Heart, that guy’s sick