Today’s choice
Previous poems
Paul Loney
BIG BLISS
i was standing
very still
my mind
on the mundane
when a bee
hit me
smashed
right into my chest
oh! immediately
i got a burst of
bush fragrance
musk & sweet &
slightly eucalypt &
delicate
& wild
sense jumped off
the sprocket / turned
inside out & oh!
i mmmagined
i was hit
by another bee
& another bee
&& bees
hitting me
a bee particle collider
blossom bomb
& fertile more
&& fast more
&&& like all things!
every once!
Paul Loney was born in Northern Ireland and emigrated to Australia when the Troubles started, and has lived and worked in various places around the world, so has a hybrid perspective of his cultural origin and multiple lived experiences. And is delighted that poems can come from just standing at a bus stop.
Fiona Theokritoff
Smickling I am as useless as a coronet, have lost a shoal of bloodied runts. Who shall assist me? Perhaps a ripe and red-faced peasant with more brats than she can raise. I need her shoes, I need a charm to stick what quickens to its cage. Perhaps...
Mark Valentine
The Road to Chalvington at Dusk Cast out from Eden he journeyed along the roads of dog-rose in the cloaky overcoat of good tweed and lit a cigarette cupped against the wind so that his fingers glowed and took that first best draught of it and...
Alan Dunnett
Descent Into Hades In order to discover what took place, I eventually made a descent by slow ratcheting, hard and easy, caught at last by the moment despite warnings and my own considerations. Your face appears before me and your will, unbent at...
Padrika Tarrant on National Flash Fiction day
An Escape In the back room’s desiccated atmosphere, the spiders stole one another’s shoes and sang their clever songs with their elbows folded. The shelf of hats stood to stiff attention, three coal black and a female in splendid blue that came...
Abigail Ardelle Zammit
Her Future Husband Appears to Her in the Shape of a Hawk after Victoria Brookland She never knows by which door he enters, but suddenly he is inside her. Her red underdress of hoops and holes stands stiff as a lightning pole. In her ribs, the...
Tom Kelly
No Easy Answer Raymond Chandler’s having a drink in his LA apartment. Light borrowed from an Edward Hopper painting; near-harsh reading lamp beacons on his desk where a trilby makes a salute to half-eaten shadows. Sitting on a stiff-backed chair...
Mark Connors
Charity shop crawl I start in Scope, find my first Kiss T-shirt from the Lick it Up tour, the old black now charcoal grey, a seven inch tongue lost to too much Persil. In Shelter, I find my leather jacket, purchased from an alternative clothing...
Holly Day
Butterfly Cage when I was pregnant, all of my dreams were about snakes. as much as I tried to dream only about baby kittens, baby puppies human babies, my nights would be filled with twisting pythons gathered in knots inside me, their slick skin...
Gareth Writer-Davies
Almost missing I am those words words in shops and passing words that are almost not language a flex of the muscle of the palate a ruler on the tongue I miss sullen vowels sudden consonants words I hung...