Today’s choice

Previous poems

Alicia Byrne Keane

by | Mar 22, 2026 | ,

 

 

 

Bureaucracies of Water

I’ve been reading about ghost apples.
They are a real phenomenon, like how
everyone we can see on the wide street
outside this building is still living,
managing thus far, attending appointments,
the fissures in their teeth holding sugar
or leaf-fibre. A ghost apple
is something the name of which I keep
forgetting so I call them glass apples instead,
which is more what they look like.
During a cold snap, fruit breaks
under its own skin; rain settles solid
as information. It takes more for an apple
to freeze, compared to water.
Lower temperature, an increase of nights.
So the flesh falls away & the ice remains,
pitted as an Autumn made of breath
or so it seems, the stalk and branch
leading to cloud-crater, iridescent air.
When we went to the sandspit island
to see our city mirrored, lights wavering
by the bulk of the docks, we each spoke
only briefly from the wind-whip of our bikes
of the lake that was forming there
among dun reeds, tenuous dunes.
This place floodplain & changing shape
from the beginning. A puddle joins another
to become rippled azure, the land
a surprised letter with absence in its middle:
p peninsula, b breakers, d disappearance.

 

 

Dr. Alicia Byrne Keane‘s poetry has been published in The Stinging Fly, Oxford Poetry and Poetry Ireland Review, among other journals. Alicia’s second collection is forthcoming from Broken Sleep Books in autumn 2026.

Linda Ford

by | Jul 12, 2023 | ,

      The Fair Leaves Town The hum of early traffic resonates where skeletal rides seek egress on lorries bound for the next town, and the road opens like a wound, becomes a thoroughfare again. We view the marketplace as we would a post-festive room,...

Eugene Stevenson

by | Jul 11, 2023 | ,

      Mace in Her Pocket She is used to walking unafraid of the echo off her heeled steps, moving through the parking lot in a still-dark, early morning hour. Mace in her pocket, fur coat on her back, fist wrapped around her keys, she takes a breath...

 Piers Cain

by | Jul 7, 2023 | ,

      I had a dream I had a dream.  I dreamt it’s time to go. It’s time to leave. It’s time to stop this game. My boss appeared, the one from years ago. Her face was pink and thick with orange paint. “Still here? They don’t pay you any more”, she said. ...

Marcia Hindson

by | Jul 6, 2023 | ,

      How To Bury Someone Else’s Da Make sure to pick the proper season. July is saturated, so is November. Spring is the perpetual king of felt-tip leaks and drownings, too full already. Remember how the whiteness of Winter is able to cool heart muscle...

Helen Campbell

by | Jul 5, 2023 | ,

      How to Write Software First feel. Shape the solution. No different from the flint knapper sitting with his rocks; seeing the skin scraper’s hidden form. Or the weaver woman stringing her loom. the finished kelim in her mind’s eye. Then you must...

Rosie Garland

by | Jul 4, 2023 | ,

      Poem inspired by an imaginary painting by Leonora Carrington Her hair is an updraft of orange flame, expression blurred like an early photograph where the cat is a flurry of paws. She has the small feet of an infant, but calloused from a lifetime...

Dennis Tomlinson

by | Jul 3, 2023 | ,

      A Life Where are the aunts of yesteryear? Where are the moles under Granny’s lawn? Where are the pickled frogs and locusts? Where are the lizards, where the kiss on the banks of the Moselle? Where is the Wall behind the Brandenburg Gate? Where is...