Today’s choice
Previous poems
Brian Kirk
Reflex
That was the time you caught
the mumps and I was half
afraid I’d catch it too.
Or it was measles and it was
me who had it, lying in bed
for days reading the bible –
children’s version, illustrated –
where the devil was all red
and had pig’s feet and horns
and Jesus wore James Brolin’s
beard and laundered robes
in the desert. They must have
been impossible to keep clean,
living on locusts and wild honey
and God knows what –
or was that John the Baptist,
the one who came before, who
wasn’t good enough to tie his sandals?
Like the one you lost that day
at the beach when the tide
came rushing in and we had
to gather up our stuff and run
to the dunes. I stood on broken glass
and you had to pick tiny slivers
out of my foot with a pen-knife
and I accidentally blackened
your eye when my foot shot
out in reflex defence. Or it was
Winter and I was sick again,
dreaming under a blanket
of thick snow – no, that can’t be right –
it never lasted, turning to slush
overnight, like everything else.
Brian Kirk has published two collections with Salmon Poetry, After The Fall (2017) and Hare’s Breath (2023) and a short fiction chapbook It’s Not Me It’s You (Southword Editions, 2019). www.briankirkwriter.com.
Dawn Sands
Walking home from the lecture on Frankenstein
through the November mizzle, small breaths of exhaust
sighing in the twilight headlights, particles of wet air commingling.
Ken Evans
Octopus I am one Like short of being beautiful. Five hundred more Followers, I’m away to fight culture wars. I Block two for lies Quora does not verify. Counter-factuals are ok, there’s simmering wastelands to make out of vague, but someone sent a shroom...
Mary Mulholland
It doesn’t trust paper. It writes itself
in my head where no one can reach it,
laugh, tear it to shreds, or
call it a waste of space, a disgrace.
Afolabi Ezra
It was a quiet day—
no bad news,
no sudden loss,
no reason to hold my breath.
Karina Jutzi
I think today of the boy in choir class
who closed his eyes when we sang
about Jesus. Who swayed, as if the Lord
Isabelle Thompson
We saw a kingfisher threading the bright needle
of his body along the river. We saw a shag, stamping
her prehistoric shadow on the sky. We saw a hobby,
Roger Robinson
We walk from cane fields,
cotton in our nightshirts, sweet
Amirah Al Wassif
My double sits before me now. I stare deep into her, as I do every day after midnight. When I raise my hands, she raises hers.
Sophie Lankarani
Even though I only once traced your streets with my own feet,
you wandered into my dreams anyway
sliding in through my grandmother’s stories,