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
Sarah Davies
Fond The Earth is not even fond of us anymore or the Goddess or the bees or the glowing children. Only dogs entertain a tolerance for us - we earned it over time, blackmail of bones and treats, but some dogs want to bite, recalling, howl, they...
Poulami Somanya Ganguly
Here I am, again after John Yau & the room is cold with its geometry of faces a child looks through cellophane & imagines an escape a place moves in time like a needlepoint on water often it’s hard to tell what’s real from reflection as a...
Anuradha Vijayakrishnan
Brief moments of light We walked by that lake each evening, within an inch of holding hands. Tiny firefish rushed to water’s edge to taste the aftermath of our feet. Vagrant water hyacinth and lonely snakebirds listened as we talked and talked....
Sinéad McClure
When is the zombie apocalypse? I might not make it. March 13th, 2020; The ghosts of Sligo's cholera outbreak walk us to the Lidl store, lurch when they see the masked and ready murmur tightly across the specials. I buy bamboo coffee cups, breathe...
Ofem Ubi
and so it goes… two boys neck-deep in a boiling argument talking about which album is best Made In Lagos or A Better Time a man calls beer the devil’s urine you do not swallow poison and expect to blossom a boy regurgitates the faces of exes...
Jack Emsden
In the form of a joke After Steven Wright I got a humidifier and a dehumidifier put them in the same room let them fight it out now my house is all shiny a confusion of moisture finding holes in the walls I watch the neighbours cooking eggs...
Hannah Gordon
Because a forest After Joe Cottonwood Because there’s a pandemic on and you should treat yourself to good air Because the height makes you look up and looking up feels good in your spine Because the air is fresh and you breath more consciously,...
S.C. Flynn
Brush-tailed landlords In Australia, we shared our house with possums who lived in the space above the ceiling. They had been there long before we moved in and likely regarded us as their tenants. We kept daylight hours that didn’t bother them and...
Susan Darlington
CARRIE (With reference to the Stephen King novel of the same title) I learn about the shame of a woman’s body from my mother’s handwritten notes. The ones I pass, red-faced, to my teacher that excuse me from showers and swimming. I stand at the edge of...