Today’s choice
Previous poems
Rhonda Melanson
Holy Ground
I imagine my mother pulling apart my praying hands. Don’t be such a holy roller, she’d taunt. Get over here, quit committing to the ethereal, get down on those knees and help your family pick strawberries. The bending made me sulky. The magic of growing things, its tangible beauty, I did not understand. Items to be plucked, washed, diced, plopped into pies and loaves, scooped into freezer bags. No one ever pointed out to me the rootedness of a carrot, pointy and orange, how within the soil, it etched out its own positive space. No one ever demonstrated to me how peas slept soundly in their own alien habitat, spaceship pods, rudely awakened by earthly poachers like me. I would have worshipped them. Extracted their baby knowledge, considered their plucked sacrifice as I consumed them, each little pearl lolling on my tongue. With this knowledge and other pursuits of gardenly delights, I might very well have wrenched back my hands, held within me a berry of fertile prayer:
red as strawberries
exploding seed and colour
spillage most holy
Patrick Deeley
Sean’s Ghost leans over the garden wall next the hairpin bend to hand me a rosy apple with the same gesture he himself showed of a stumblebum evening when I was a child making my way home after a bad day at school. Though the apple holds no substance now, and...
Sophia Argyris
HERONLESS I look for him from the foot bridge he's not in any of his usual places not mid-stream in shallows not below the arch under the road not at the corner on a stony outcrop the fishes are swimming undeterred and the day feels so...
Jessica Mookherjee
Second Generation Upgrade I take an invisible dog on holiday to the coast, with raven feather tied to my hair and a new iphone in my bag, my passport is ready for a quick get away, and I must look a sight in these snow-boots and sunset skin. I ask...
Dane Holt
Dane Holt’s poems have been published in Poetry Ireland Review, The Trumpet, The White Review, Stand, bath magg, One Hand Clapping , Anthropocene and elsewhere. He is poetry editor of The Tangerine, a Belfast magazine of new...
Jean O’Brien
The Arrow that Flies by Day (Psalm 91) To my first readers I present fragments, half- rhymes, vowels, words, somewhere a metronome beats time and we split the line into syllables, metric feet, then come the myths and metaphors, music sounds near....
Julie Maclean
I take a torch to 4am climb the stairs so I can be closer to the moon or Venus, something private, divine Moisture on the roof out of nowhere suggests autumn is creeping in like the possum whose red eyes in the beam are jewels of curiosity or fear...
Mark Blaeuer
Harlan & Siv Euglena Harlan presides at our Church of Gullibility in the Vale, accused of murdering his younger self. Prosecutor Marat Siv arrays testimony, exhibits, arguments against the Judge-Who-Rules-at-Pulpit. During a recess, Siv...
Peter J Donnelly
Auntie Joyce I knew your face when I saw you from the backseat window in the hospital car park where you stood talking to my dad, so I must have seen you before then. Perhaps at your son’s wedding, for you had to be there. I remembered you also...
Miranda Lynn Barnes
Norwegian Trees Still Bear Evidence of a WWII German Battleship According to their research, one tree sampled saw no new growth for nine years after 1945. - The Smithsonian Imagine a ship pulls up into your fjord and releases a cloud of...