Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jennie E. Owen
Then tragedy makes children of us all
and in that last moment
the dead shrug, shake
off their boots, shuffle off
jackets and shirts, watch astounded
as their dresses grow and drop to their feet.
Their bags, their glasses, car keys and phones
clatter far away
scatter in rings too far too reach.
They are all elbows and scuffed knees
naked but covered
in primary crayon-box colours.
Every one of them fidgets
in their little wooden box
skipping through their mother’s hearts
blowing out the birthday candles of her eyes
over and over.
This soft reduction leaves the rest of us open mouthed
too small to see over the counter, full
of questions that cannot be asked
cannot be answered.
Jennie E. Owen has been widely published online, in literary journals and anthologies. She is Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Forward Prize nominated. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing for The Open University and lives in Lancashire with her husband and three children. Jennie is a PGR at MMU, focusing on traumascapes in the north-west of England.
Jo Farrant
We’re stuck on a scene, frozen, like the ice cubes I begged Mum to get with the little flowers in them. Like taking a test in the school gym but your knees are so big they’re banging into the desk.
Douglas K Currier
Afternoon hangs in the air, and the birds leave.
Frogs begin to talk to each other, and the heat congeals.
Stephen Chappell
If you could call that friend,
the special one,
the one you always love and know loves you
Marius Grose
Until the dead, sucked from leaf mould graves
are rising in forest sap, to make connections
inside strange green brains
Andrew Keyman
a day later you’re in l.a. picking out cars with the magic
only money can buy
Chrissy Banks
So many times I walked
head down half asleep
along that ordinary road to school
Christopher M James
She’d had the two of us, had learnt
how children bury their riddles, how love
unearths them
Opeyemi Oluwayomi
They are piercing knife between
the city, detaching the body from the head,
& squeezing the blood out of the flesh,
so there can be an end to what hasn’t begun.
Rhian Thomas
I sit to fumble some intrusion from my shoe.
A shard of stone, no bigger than a thought, its ridged face
cutting like some old lover, like a baby or
an old preacher drumming something that irks like a worn out song