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/
Sally Michaelson on Holocaust Memorial Day
from The Lorch Family Magic Trick Adolf Althoff is used to riding tigers so when Gestapo soldiers come looking for Irene he plies them with Schnapps while Irene squeezes into a passage tight as a magician’s box – contracting in size until she is...
Anna Saunders
Telling the Bees Little vials into which the sun has poured I tell you all I know about the failing crop, a marriage party, a stricken cow. Last summer I tied a ribbon to the top of your home, whispered with a sweet tongue that a new master had come....
Andrew Nightingale
How it feels to be a bat There are the headaches, then the feverish sense of darkness. Taste, none but the crackly limbs of gnats. Hate is a constant on the radar and immense blank surfaces block the call by which I come to belong in the shape of a...
David Belcher
A defence against all sabotage I shake out the creases from my coat, and climb the hundred steps leading to the feet of a bronze giant, its right hand raised, welcoming. I’m meant to lift my eyes, to take in its magnificence, to be stirred up into...
Holly Conant
The Slip Hold on tight to my writing hand, darling boy. Who knows how many words I have left. Don’t let me give them all to the page. Holly Conant is a new writer and mature student, currently studying at the University of Leeds. Her poems...
Sidrah Zubair
IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUIRED We have detected a trojan virus! I have developed affinities for dying in peculiar ways such as being choked by the moonlight’s shaking hands or swallowing a cup of live rattlesnake babies Personal and banking information is at...
Jenny Mitchell
Vanishing Mother A jar of Pond’s cold cream glows in amongst her female debris on the dressing table; talc sprinkled with a lipstick smear across a comb. Tissues fluff out of a slit – half-done magic trick beneath a heart-shaped mirror, picturing the...
Caleb Parkin
Ecco the Dolphin Sega Megadrive, 1992 Ecco roves immaculate 16-bit oceans, pierces through jellyfish sparkling their assigned scores. Ecco rotates side on, a perpetual loading icon, flips through scrolling screens of digital habitat. Ecco is neat between...
Antonela Pallini-Zemin
Mix & Match but what if we mixed the smoke of my incense sticks & the smoke of your rolled-up happiness in a room only suitable for two? what if we mixed & matched your hundred fingers with my four fingerprints? what if we let my kundalini...