Today’s choice

Previous poems

Erich von Hungen

 

 
 

Burning Wings

Dark
but tolerable
The air, itself,
no longer sweating.

And the yellow moths
like some strange throw-away
tissues used up by nature
circle the lamp hanging above.

Nearer and further they stitch,
around and back and past me.
I see one fall and burn so close
to what he wants, is most driven to.

I wonder, then, what I look like
singed so often myself
and how much my soul smells
like burning wings?
 
 
Erich von Hungen is a writer from San Francisco, California. His writing has appeared in The Write Launch, Colorado Quarterly, Green Ink Press, The Hyacinth Review, IceFloe Press, Fahmidan Journal, Broken Spine Press and others. He is the author of four poetry books. The most recent is “Bleeding Through: 72 Poems of Man in Nature”. Find him on X @poetryforce.

Helen Frances

I wasn’t in, so she left me a note.
Each word a tangle of broken ends, some oddly linked
to the next with a ghost trail of ink
from her rose-gold marbled fountain pen,
a rare indulgence she’d bought herself.

Maggie Brookes-Butt

For you, with your toddler bendiness,
the squat is a natural, easy position
while I hurt-strain, thinking of miners
crouched outside their front doors

Carmen Marcus

        extract from The Keen Is ar scath a Chéile a mhaireann na daoine: It is in the shadow of each other we live. Watching with the dying. Travelling with the dead. Phyllida Anam-Áire; The Celtic Book of Dying, Findhorn Press, Vermont, 2022 Àite...