Today’s choice
Previous poems
Konstandinos (Dino) Mahoney
Box
A teacher guides his pupils past headless marble torsos,
dusty cabinets of tiny Attic coins, pockmarked stylobates,
to a large clay pithos, Said to be the original Pandora’s Box,
he tells them, reading from his Lonely Planet Guide.
They stare at the old clay pot – not even a box.
A tall boy steps forward, sticks his head in it and belches.
Teacher shepherds them out into furnace heat,
their tour bus shimmering on a cloud of blue exhaust.
The janitor yawns, turns off the air-conditioning,
putts off downhill on his vintage motor scooter.
Abandoned, the exhibits maintain a silent indifference.
But inside the pithos, something stirs.
Konstandinos (Dino) Mahoney won publication of his collection, The Great Comet of 1996 Foretellsin the 2021 Live Canon collection competition. Tutti Fruiti was a winner of the Sentinel Poetry Book Competition. His poem, ‘Peace Pipe’ was voted poem of the month in IS&T. https://www.dinomahoney.co.uk/
Susie Wilson
Ceilings don’t hold water well.
Burst a pipe at the top
of an apartment block
to test this theory, if you will.
Andy Breckenridge
Abertawe After Richard Siken For CHD Tell me about the time I mansplained that Swansea is the English for Abertawe and means town at the mouth of the River Tawe. And about when, from the hill above Rhossili beach Lundy Island’s spectral mass...
Mark Wyatt
Daedalus
Plato loved his incessant questioning
of the natural world’s engineering
Sue Wallace-Shaddad
I tempt you with morsels
of soft-skinned peach, a pear sliced
in quarters, pipless and skinless.
Lesley Burt
Red-hot-pokers blazon her two world wars in flowerbeds, and in her hearth. The coalman drops odd nuggets under gaslight for neighbours to fetch in a bucket.
From the Archives: Dipo Baruwa-Etti
Seats
Before a table of white
People, I stand with ballet
Slippers strapped/soft soles
Head pointed towards the angels…
Ian Harker
The first night you lay down your head in London
there is hawthorne between your sheets.
Julian Bishop
He emerges at nightfall, lights a solitary votive candle//
prostrates himself at her scuffed toes.
Jon Miller
Haul down the ladder and you’re in
under a skylight casting a blue dream.