Today’s choice
Previous poems
Samantha Carr
The Girl with Goldfish Under Her Skin
She has few secrets with her translucent map skin of blue underground rivers visible to scale. Contours of overlapping knots oblivious to each other and to you – mesmerised by the girl with goldfish under her skin. Perhaps, you reflect, we all have goldfish, but we’ve never thought of looking for them. You make a mental note to check when you get home. But you will forget. Is it her glassiness that makes you dream of putting her in a tank the next time she comes for a consultation? You’re unable to pay attention to her list of symptoms – you’re back in anatomy class with that professor who insisted on failing you. If he’d produced a diagram of her, you’d have been a surgeon for sure! You wait for the flash of a golden tail – hadn’t realised you’d been holding your breath. What do raised antinuclear antibodies mean? Her voice penetrates your consciousness as the glow fades into depths hidden by dense lumpy organs. Oh, those lucky organs. You reassure her with a voice you don’t recognise – Low titre ANA is commonly seen in the healthy population. You rush her out of the room and hope she doesn’t return.
Samantha Carr is a PhD Creative Writing candidate at the University of Plymouth exploring chronic illness through prose poetry. Her work has been published in Acumen, Arc, Corporeal, Consilience and The Storms Journal. She can be found on Threads and Instagram as @samc4_rr
Rachael Clyne
What I Asked of Life When I was six, Life gave me cartwheels, bilberry pie and all of us at the mirror, comparing purpled tongues. From thirteen to thirty I pleaded, Give me a Christian nose, legs up to my armpits. And please, stop me having...
Maggie Mackay,Yara Stepurova & Christina Hennemann
Mole Understands my Grief She digs into soft earth in search of solace and slugs. I slide into the bathtub below the tidal line. We’re solitary. In enclosed space. Time slips. Down plughole or into soil. My mother ages. I’m dim sighted by how this...
Ruth Stacey
Colour is Distracting Feel the Prussian Blue pushing against the eyelids. Oxide Green touches the arch of an undressed foot. Raw Umber brushes against the neglected fold of an elbow and leaves a Red Ochre rash. Gold and Silver fill the throat....
Smitha Sehgal
Chutney Music paint the bones of irascible day, braided light, sway of blue mist, island sunrise, yellow bird perches on cordwood, migrant wind, I become a sand house, half-closed eyes, listening to musty ripe poems that hold doors to the last...
Massimiliano Nastri
When You Leave, Two Are Leaving One behaves like foreign media: Only notices the events’ cracks, not the water drops hollowing the stones, The ballet school the kids used to go to, its eyes gorged out The dentist’s chair now in the middle of the...
Simon Williams
Mysterious Primates I’ve seen them again – actually not that hard to catch sight, there are so many of them, now. We call them ‘small feet’ because of their prints; their adults’ match our smallest children’s. They wear skins – so little hair – all kinds...
Patrick B. Osada
Hares New born, the leveret hunkers down, this shallow grassy form its only refuge. From the field gate — one careless step away — it faces lowering skies and April deluge. Furred and mobile, leverets grow up fast — once an evening visit from their...
Neil Fulwood
Chef (i.m. Kevin Higgins) You saw the world for what it was and responded with a flambé of possibility. You saw the charlatans for who they were and knew exactly the combination of spices to season them with before you roasted them. The truth was...
Tanya Parker
Circus We are the leave-takers, rolling our hearts in tents. Rootless, our life is soil, any soil. With the first flutters of red we drive a stake in a ground, peg ourselves to the here and now. Harlequin knows the grist of a place, instantly: takes his...