Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jane Ayres
Deathbed Fantasia
as now melts & nowhere goes nowhere
we wash up breathless
a box of blue light star-cushioned
harvesting morphine-thick razorlick-blueberry-pinch
& my sub-tropical heart
will punctuate the idea of treacling hope
puncturing the sense of a book
Opacity.
(it is not enough it is not enough)
find the version of yourself with sharpened corners
urge it forwards
& now the blue makes sense. kind of.
Jane Ayres was shortlisted for the 2021 Aesthetica Creative Writing Award. Her first collection edible was published by Beir Bua Press (July 2022) and micro-chapbook my lost womb still sings to me published by Porkbelly Press (October 2023)
Sheila Saunders
Which is the subject?
Limp-leaved yucca
reluctantly dying,
the foreground figure
in its stony pot?
Trelawney
What is holding you back from building your wormery?
You can’t say there isn’t the time. Everyone has the time
when it comes to a wormery. Born with the right tools to hand.
David Van-Cauter
…4am and the birdsong begins, a wet January in a new city and I’m alone watching a man in Minnesota, murdered for protecting a woman from a fascist hit squad. . .
Tim Dwyer
Unexpectedly
My neighbour
opens her window
for fresh salty air
Paul Moclair
Their shore leave over,
. . . the spirits of the dead are bid farewell
until that time next year, when ritual
grants them reprieve again.
Susan Elizabeth Hale
Sometimes words are the only thing
that get you through,
But not the words you think,
not a word like love or hope
those are imprecise.
Seán Street
We lit a candle for you
that day in Sacre Coeur,
under its white-flame dome
as high as Paris could go
Marjory Woodfield
On Kinley’s Lane, quince tree, wild blackberries, branches of feijoa reaching over a fence, fallen fruit.
Ian Seed
What was the Welsh for ‘hedgehog’? That was what he wanted to know.