Today’s choice
Previous poems
John Grey
Just in Case You’d Forgotten
there are some lives
lived poolside
and others that
mostly consist of
a bent back in a field –
some are chauffeured
some are piled into the backs of trucks
driven fifty miles
from border to farm
on rough roads –
some lives make deals
others deal with what’s dealt them –
all are dripping wet –
a few from beads of chlorine
most from sweat
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, River And South and The Alembic. Latest books, Subject Matters, Between Two Fires and Covert are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Paterson Literary Review, White Wall Review and Cantos.
Adam Flint
All summer automatic exits remain
open, and no one leaves or boards.
David Van-Cauter
You are pleased to see me
in my gothic T-shirt –
those bats, you say, have been your friends.
Mark Wyatt
yes of course/ it was idyllic, reclining (pint of/ cider in hand) poolside in the harvesting/ sunlight
Catherine Shonack
when confronted with vast, endlessness of the ocean
who wouldn’t go mad?
Ansuya Patel
Women scrape coins from their purse,
count pennies, one lifts up a watermelon
in mid-air like raising a newborn to light.
Pippa Little
a woman’s rage cannot raise the dead
but it may split stone like lightning
Abiodun Salako
a boy grows tired
of dying again and again.
i am building him a morgue
for Thanksgiving.
Patrick Wright
It’s as if the dream
is telling me we are still joined
somehow, despite waking
and me trudging on, even though
your voicemail is off, your locks
changed.
William Collins
We carry the shame of Paragraph 352D
folded into suitcases at foreign borders,
where love is questioned like a crime,
and disbelief stamped heavier than visas.
They tell us to run for our lives —
but only if we can do it quietly.