Today’s choice
Previous poems
Ella B. Winters
Human
Across the road stands a woman
wearing a child on her heart, her breast-
milk stained t-shirt plays
peek-a-boo with the infant’s
bobbing head, toothless grin
scattering in all directions. The baby
raises her hands like a conductor
readying an orchestra for the first bar.
All traffic is suspended in red
anticipation, eyes trained on the miniature
fingers which, having secured attention,
begin to ripple through the air,
a wordless being commanding the world
with her malcoordinated wave.
The response is instant: exuberant
smiles from parents and children, workworn
builders, the owner of the kebab shop
on the street corner– everyone
complies, waves back, because who can
resist this glorious dictatorship
of swaying palms, grasping air
like treasure, catching each smile
in babyfat creases and tossing it back
into the junction, where it is picked up
like an ancient melody and passed along.
An improvised performance
we can all understand – you are
human, and so am I.
Ella B. Winters (she/they) is a social worker, researcher, and writer, currently living in England. Her poetry often explores themes of identity, memory and belonging. She is working on her PhD.
Samarth Agarwal
Here — in the absolute zero of space — fireworks!
Look how the crucibles of creation,
those million coloured fingers that stretch light years —
Jenny Scoones
We unlearn how it felt to touch
And resume our separate days in shirts and trousers,
Like hazmats against the sun and its longing,
The moon with its underbelly pulls.
Matt Bryden
Now a blanket is spread, offerings
of chutney and shin bones,
a taper held to the fire
that heats the tar beneath our boats.
Kit Duke
I didn’t know then,
moving for a mouth
that refused to yield an inch,
what it wasn’t.
Janet Hatherley
In my cookery exam, we have to prepare a family meal This is summer and Mum can’t put out her trot line with its hooks because of swimmers so I buy three mackerel from the fishmonger. I cycle to the school bus stop one arm on the handlebar,...
Jane Ayres
& my sub-tropical heart
will punctuate the idea of treacling hope
puncturing the sense of a book
Annette Iles
across the street
I am washed off my feet
my heart
splashes up into pieces
Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig
Dusk is dancing & all the visual technologies at hand feel
overwhelmed: mobile eye, pit pastels, graphic card.
It’s down to language, then, imagine.
Antony Owen
Twenty- something sex are bodies.
thrown down like sophomore prose.