Today’s choice

Previous poems

Brian Kirk

by | Jan 14, 2025 | ,

 

 

 

Leaving

The train is the way,
the tracks a scar cut
deep in the land
you can’t help but touch.
Across the viaduct
and over the stinking
estuary, leave fields
behind for factories,
waste ground, horses
nosing rubbled grass,
past a desert of concrete
and blinking glass, and on
until you see the backs
of sleeping red brick
houses, places you’ll
never know: cramped
back garden, broken swing,
riot of bindweed choking
a breeze block wall. So early
sleep stays with you,
pulls you back, rocked
by the slackening diesel
engine, chanting: won’t
you come back, won’t
you come back. Morning sun
above the East Wall Road,
a crack of stone on glass
announces the beginning
of a different life.

 

 

Brian Kirk has published two collections with Salmon Poetry, After The Fall (2017) and Hare’s Breath (2023) and a fiction chapbook It’s Not Me It’s You (Southword Editions, 2019). His novel Riverrun was a winner of the Novel Fair 2022.

Maeve McKenna

by | Oct 18, 2021 | ,

      Dream State Covers tight as clingfilm. Tell them you fell headfirst, steadied yourself, sucked out what was left in your throat, coughed that creamy polyethylene onto the pillow. Eyeballs infused with miniature blue irises plunge into the well....

Abigail Elizabeth Ottley

by | Oct 17, 2021 | ,

      Widows Walk Evenings she puts on her second-best hat skewered with a tortoise shell pin, buttons up her heart in a mauve mohair coat sallies forth to pick a bone with the moon. On the red-leaded step she scans the stars imagines them white sparks...

Guy Elston

by | Oct 16, 2021 | ,

      You Call This Summer More like a chicken bone tossed to a pigeon. More like a half-portion of peanut butter slicked in the jar we never throw out. I pedal through birds in Tommy Thompson, all strong enough to fly south soon – if I check the water...

Yuanbing Zhang translates Hongri Yuan

by | Oct 15, 2021 | ,

      My Heaven is Inside My Body My heaven is inside my body, my heaven is a great many, like stars in the night sky, with silver towers, huge edifices that look like sapphires, golden palaces, gardens of crystal. My body is bigger than the universe,...