Today’s choice
Previous poems
Clive Donovan
Three Winds
I go to the top of the risen hill,
above the trees, beyond the grass,
where only hard ground lives
—and three winds mingle, whispering,
all merging in a jostle.
They use my body frame to make sound
and, listening, I hear, as they tell
where they’ve been and where they go:
You, man, with a gravestone in your heart,
let us shake your woes away
and they do, they really do,
they rattle my teeth with generosity.
I retreat,
my cold hands in empty pockets,
full of the wisdom of the great silence.
Clive Donovan has three poetry collections, The Taste of Glass [Cinnamon Press 2021], Wound Up With Love [Lapwing 2022] and Movement of People [Dempsey&Windle 2024] and is published in a wide variety of magazines including Acumen, Crannog, Ink Sweat & Tears, Prole and Stand.
Holly Conant
Grooming My brain was full of hair that you wanted to brush, style like a dolly. Good dolly. You worked your way up to stroking it, as if I were fleshy, jellyfish tendrils, that I might sting you if I wasn’t ready. You gathered the threads of my...
Jennie E. Owen
I’m pulling my hair out again and I worry that this is how the children will remember me. As balls of tangled fluff, that roll lazily under the sofa, to snag later in the hoover. Will they curse me every time they have to empty the bag? Take it...
Jane Pearn
Gone The tap is not dripping. I check the windows and leave. The doors are all locked. I sit on the bus and wait for a thought. Nothing comes. The tap is not dripping. I look out at the muddy fields and write a note to myself. The doors are all...
Chrissie Gittins
Start With The Thing That Can Fly Away It was a goldfinch balancing on a teezle, she’d planted it for this very reason, and to see a tall hat of snow. The custard yellow flashes, the head dipped in red, the white apostrophes on black wings. But...
Jason Visconti
Alley Cat The dark never knew such corridors, The evening gallant upon its fur. Jason Visconti has attended both group and private poetry workshops. His work has appeared in various journals, including Literary Yard, Indigo Rising,...
Lara Frankena
Bowled Over As I walk them home from school Sneaky Camouflage and Brave Barry train for The Big Fight, dangling from fence railings and fake-kicking brick walls in their black Mary Janes. They’re going to swap summer uniforms for shorts and...
Rituparna Sahoo
Birding at dusk On the shores of Mangalajodi: one of Chilika’s few undiscovered corners, the boatman welcomed me with warmth in his eyes. As these wetlands happen to be the turf of these poachers turned naturalists who know it like the back of their...
D’or Seifer
Visit Your building is an early 2000’s monstrosity. Mini palm trees and cultivated grass embedded in studded concrete, sweat stained balconies a spit away from the diamond exchange where night brings out prowlers in business suits and lambs paling...
Michael Estabrook
because I’m a car mechanic’s son When Ed who’s a doctor’s son couldn’t start his car in the snow outside Salzburg after The Magic Flute, I got out to push saying “Pop the clutch Eddie after I get her rolling” which I knew how to do – * because you...