Today’s choice
Previous poems
Pamilerin Jacob
Annette’s Ode
Slithering through incisor-gap, English leapt
from your lips to mine, a string
between you & me, ringed
with hot coals we slide back & forth
in the air like abacus beads. Coals
that warm & warn: lighting the way
as best they can, although
Yoruba is the exact shape
of the bulb in the room, & we have,
like plants learnt to tilt
in the direction of that Light,
prayers pouring out of you unhindered
like water from a hose
left in the lawn all night, every
cranny of me grateful to be
soaked & nourished
Annette the gap-toothed,
You kissed a man & I was born. You gave him
your laughter & he built an empire,
died, leaving you to mourn. Your one love,
muttering psalms in the grave’s dark
wishing he could return, seeing only
your gap-tooth in the distance
thinking it a door, through which
years ago English leapt, lip to lip
anxious to fulfil the injunction of blood.
Pamilerin Jacob’s poems have appeared in POETRY, Lolwe, The Rumpus, Agbowó, Palette, 20.35 Africa, & elsewhere. He is the Founding Editor of Poetry Column-NND, Poetry Sango-Ota, among others. His manuscript, Blight Fantasia, was a finalist in the Walt McDonald First-Book Poetry Competition 2024.
Trelawney
Chalice You are invited to the special dinner where I’m turning turning the blood on the costume a birthmark shaped like a question on your lips there is a wasp an asp in my milk you would have me fail. Trelawney has been shortlisted and commended in the...
Freya Cook
You Eat a Moon as a Metaphor for Pain Here’s what’s going to happen: the moon is going to fall out of the sky and land in the basketball court in front of the apartment where your dad died. You are going to swallow it. Here’s what you are going to do: be buried under...
Olivier Faivre
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Alix Scott-Martin
Founding these boys have iron bones forged in foundries tongues like metal latches hinged at the shoulders names clattering clasps on stone their forefathers knew soot as dawn light the trudge & lift of it worn in their palm lines bit lips tasting of...
Ozge Gozturk
Row Your Own Boat, Please. It’s hard to be a bird in the winter – legs dipped into cold, dirty Thames’ water. No roof to hide under. It’s hard to stand against the current to prove your fallacies, your name, under your oppressing fog. It’s hard...
Sekhar Banerjee
Of Shadows and Blebs November, the slow month, crowds the morning streets like a herd of brown ponies looking for a patch of green Ferries, laden with mint and cauliflowers, sprout on the Hooghly River like blebs on its soft skin Calcutta, full of...
David Belcher
I am about to do something bodacious Barefoot in the yard, eating a slice of buttered toast, I feel a tremor in my bones. Usually, I am full of plans, but not today. I cannot picture the future. I am carried along by the sensation that I am about...
Judith Taylor
The necklace was a gift from where they mine it out of the mountains. Haematite: an iron stone. Dense beads as grey as the metal; polished. It is cold against its wearer till it borrows some of their blood heat and if they should move too freely...
Julie Laing
Julie Laing is a Glasgow-based writer and artist. She won the 2022 Wigtown Poetry Prize and is a recent Clydebuilt Verse Apprenticeship mentee. Her work has been published in several anthologies including Gutter and The Edwin Morgan Centenary Collection. More...