Today’s choice

Previous poems

Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig

 

 

 

Grief shows me just another sunset

 

Dusk is dancing & all the visual technologies at hand feel
overwhelmed: mobile eye, pit pastels, graphic card.

It’s down to language, then, imagine.

Above parade pearlescent clouds
looking more permanent than us. 
Behind you, incandescent gloaming 
rips through time, retina, skin.

This clarity, it blinds the soul, its old familiar. 

Listen
how it sings
setting every edge on fire.

Watch
how it streams, 
extends, pinks up.

Maybe now you share my sense 
of consolation:

that those who went before us,
& who loved us,

those whom we love, 
still,

lived 

to see this light.

 

Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig is a translator, editor, and author. Her poetry publications include the pamphlet kinscapes and the anthology The Joy of Living (both with Dreich). Her work has appeared in various publications, including Poetry Scotland, Dust Poetry, and Neologism.

Jason Lovell

While children kneel at your cage in awe
edge offerings of cashew nuts, chopped fruit,
curse words into your magnificent beak,
mums settle carrier bags at tired wet feet

Elijah MacBean

      My Name is My Name Ami never let anyone call my sister Sam – it always had to be Samina. She said she’d rather be waterboarded than let her daughter be whitewashed by whites too conservative to spare the extra syllables. Ami never let anyone call...

Damen O’Brien

The coastline’s smile is sharp with blackened teeth,
seabird shelters, scarps, cutaways, broken reefs:
the bloody mouth of a boxer who can’t be dropped,
punch drunk with the brain’s purple pounding . . .