Today’s choice
Previous poems
Elizabeth Loudon
Forty (for Maryna)
The first three days of war
have a surprising holiday feel.
No deadlines, just the giddy gasp of shock.
Ordinary life continues.
The girl in white socks in the flat downstairs
plays a prelude then turns, pleased,
to an audience of one, who awakes
as if from a deep sleep
and manages to applaud.
Later, you hear sirens and grab sugar lumps
for the baby, throw slippers to your father
who can’t tie his shoes.
In the tunnels you sit close together for warmth.
Nobody sings. In the cold you realise
you left your favourite red jacket on the bus,
but this is no time for tantrums
when there are boys face down,
all for a few square metres of mud,
who were once face down upon you.
It takes forty nights to become accustomed
to anything that strips you to the core:
a difficult birth, cold-eyed jailor,
our failure to come to your rescue.
The little green light beside your name
still said available. Any earlier,
we’d have screwed up our entrance.
It’s not easy, either, sitting on the side-lines
and stroking the lithium-lit news, over and over.
It looks like we’re smiling.
We’re not. It’s what our faces do
when they hurt, stuffed with words
that are hard to spit, harder to swallow.
If you’d only feel sorry for us.
Elizabeth Loudon is a poet and novelist living in southwest England after 25 years in the US. She writes about violence, loss and displacement, and mothers and daughters. When not writing, She’s mostly outside. There’s more at www.elizabethloudon.com.
Dillon Jaxx
fossil fast forward a million years or seven ice cream sticky fingers picking up the shell of me nestled in the sputum on the beach tilting me this way and that looking for angles tracing ice cream fingers through the ess that housed my spine look...
Adrija Ghosh
your flesh is an abacus. i touch every crumb of the morning on you dust it off part you open real slick slow my fingers knead the hard math of you, the science your goosebumps, my abacus beads that substitutes logic. you rosary between my fingers,...
Maggie Harris
If I was that woman If I was that woman. If I was that woman in the big house with the tall windows like eyes staring across open farmland where the late afternoon sunset glazes the manicure of her lashes. If I was that woman whose Italian...
Rachael Clyne
What I Asked of Life When I was six, Life gave me cartwheels, bilberry pie and all of us at the mirror, comparing purpled tongues. From thirteen to thirty I pleaded, Give me a Christian nose, legs up to my armpits. And please, stop me having...
Maggie Mackay,Yara Stepurova & Christina Hennemann
Mole Understands my Grief She digs into soft earth in search of solace and slugs. I slide into the bathtub below the tidal line. We’re solitary. In enclosed space. Time slips. Down plughole or into soil. My mother ages. I’m dim sighted by how this...
Ruth Stacey
Colour is Distracting Feel the Prussian Blue pushing against the eyelids. Oxide Green touches the arch of an undressed foot. Raw Umber brushes against the neglected fold of an elbow and leaves a Red Ochre rash. Gold and Silver fill the throat....
Smitha Sehgal
Chutney Music paint the bones of irascible day, braided light, sway of blue mist, island sunrise, yellow bird perches on cordwood, migrant wind, I become a sand house, half-closed eyes, listening to musty ripe poems that hold doors to the last...
Massimiliano Nastri
When You Leave, Two Are Leaving One behaves like foreign media: Only notices the events’ cracks, not the water drops hollowing the stones, The ballet school the kids used to go to, its eyes gorged out The dentist’s chair now in the middle of the...
Simon Williams
Mysterious Primates I’ve seen them again – actually not that hard to catch sight, there are so many of them, now. We call them ‘small feet’ because of their prints; their adults’ match our smallest children’s. They wear skins – so little hair – all kinds...