Today’s choice
Previous poems
Tadhg Carey
Pivotal
When our plaything ricochets
falling
who knows where
everything hinging
on the line
there is a precise moment
when nothing is certain
a glorious terrifying uncontrollable
wait
the receptacle of our hopes
poised mid-
air with infinite trajectories
across the open field of possibility
time is slowed to an inhalation
and as I write this I am helpless
as an onlooker watching
from the sidelines
open-
mouthed
on the threshold of expression
not knowing where this will all end
nor what will follow the breaking
of the line
Tadhg Carey is a writer from Ireland. He is a Shared Island Freedom to Write Project awardee, was selected for the Cúirt International Festival New Writing Showcase, and was highly commended in the Fool for Poetry International Chapbook competition.
Tamsin Flower
Girls Smell Sweaty. Hyacinth-sprayed, nylon girls. Typing. Cats-eyeing you, their manager. Staring. Each other, full watery of last night’s bar/ argument. Boyfriends. They don’t understand. How to handle them? Surly at home and at the office. But...
Katherine Meehan
The Pleasure Club Stumbling towards the daytime party, the summer humid and loud in the pine wood, the quarry lake filled in with the reflection of trees —here is a cold beer bottle. Press it against your sunburned face. You have agreed to the...
Janet Hatherley
Skirting the banana skin Did you leave that for me to slip on, I ask. My daughter’s baking and we laugh because we both know since my stroke nine months ago she and her brother question why I’m wearing flip-flops, tell me to hold on when I’m...
Nastia Svarevska
don’t watch your mouth you were cold so i moved closer hungry for more your hands under my striped jumper that still smells of my mum silently stripping for you dancing the outline of your broken voice call me when you need me but i dropped my...
Gregory Kearns
Archive of a friend’s tenderness For Luke You made red velvet cupcakes to mark some minor victory of mine. Without the egg and dairy, you compensated with sugar and I think I’m still high off it now. Though you find yourself too ill to practice...
Rachel Spence
Haiku Calendar January, fear Like a preacher, elsewhered, dubbed To a moonbeam howl February - wolf Lopes across rock-snarled borders Inhuman stone tongue March - willow-wand faith Unbridled, even tonight As the mouse roars by April – shameless...
Frank Dullaghan
The Big Outside For Ellis b 1/2/21 In the beginning there is light and the soft rhythmic boom of the dark stops. I open my mouth and become hunger. I call out and create a mother. Wherever I look, I bring the world into being. I make a man and a...
Anne Symons
content warning: rape He wrote on the ground (John 8:8) a finger in the dust grit under nail grubby sun-hardened skin little ridges in the soil stones pushed aside an earthy writing slate curled or straight I never knew my...
Sharon Phillips
Salvatrix Mundi It’s hard to be Jesus with the housework to do and the world to care for all on her own. She’s stopped going to bed. Once the ironing’s done she'll nod off in her chair. She wakes up about four alert for earthquakes or floods. She...