Today’s choice
Previous poems
Martin Mooney
Lapse
Graffiti artists, known as writers, are often misunderstood by society.
Eden Magazine
The footbridge was skinned in graffiti – slogans, threats,
declarations of love, swastikas. Grek. Kost. Lapse.
I’d assumed lapse was a tag, a nom de plume or guerre, but
as the morning drags itself towards noon the word
has surfaced and resurfaced: lapse, lapse, lapse. Noun
or verb? Am I instructed? Warned? By lunchtime
I wonder if it’s even word at all, perhaps the writer
just sprayed shapes that look like L A P S E by fluke.
And by mid-afternoon it’s drained of sense, a dazed
semantic husk, so that as I cross the bridge again
I whisper it to myself as virgin sound, unsaid till now:
brute air lip-shaped, a world in a kind of freefall.
Martin Mooney is the author of four collections – Grub (1993), Rasputin and his Children (2000), Blue Lamp Disco (2003) and The Resurrection of the Body at Killysuggen (2011). A New and Selected is due from Greenwich Exchange later in 2026
James Benger
We tore it all down
just to watch it burn,
standing in that alley
of forgotten refuse.
Graham Clifford
Check the cavities in you where hurt goes,
exactly the right shape to house an insult
like a power tool snug and clipped in its case.
Gill Horitz
I woke to workers with blades
along the verge, yellow-jacketed
to signify contracted rights
Anita Karla Kelly, CE Collins, Clare Painter on International Women’s Day
In the beginning of the end she bit the thing she wasn’t meant to bite.
Apple stuck in her throat, one bite taken, then swallowed whole.
Elaine Baker
To my Ovaries
My cahoonas. My muscular daisies.
Potent white olives. You make me sick.
Jan FitzGerald
What is not to love
when you draw back curtains
and taste clouds
in their newness and innocence
Helen Finney
At my feet the window sprawls a view of kneaded land,
craggy baked by the hand of the gods, dusted green
with short bit grass.
Eugene O’Hare
It hasn’t been this bright all year –
the moon’s white scalp, spot-lit,
a head turned away from a thing
the rest of us fear: unearthly dark
Juliet Humphreys
Though I am not a painter
this is to be a portrait
of my parents and my sister.