Today’s choice
Previous poems
Kath Mckay
How to become two-dimensional
Die. You’re soon reduced to a photograph.
Lugubrious Co-op undertakers will zip you in a bag
and keep you cold, until you’re moved care of Michael,
with curly grey locks like Frodo, who has dropped
too much acid in his youth according to my friend: ‘Look at his eyes,’ she says.
Chill for ten days, be dressed in jacket and jeans,
your daughter’s South Park tie: You will respect my authority.
Burn. Reduced to ash, be thrown into a tree hole in Leeds,
and carried to Pittwater and scattered.
As a photograph, people can kiss your face,
but you can’t kiss back, or put your tongue
down her throat, or curl into her. Nothing left of your arms,
to wrap around her in bed. Only your photo, grinning,
fixed and unchanging. When you were quicksilver, planning
to clear the front garden, take up Spanish, go backpacking in Spain.
Kath Mckay has published three full poetry collections, the most recent, Moving the Elephant, from Michael Laskey’s Garlic Press . She also publishes short stories and longer fiction.
Kate Bailey
They’ve mended the park fence again,
patched it over with the usual ugly metalwork,
like a riot barricade.
Ibrar Sami
Across the barren land
where blood once played its savage Holi,
the fearless migratory birds
have returned again.
Anyonita Green
It wobbles slightly, red wine jelly.
I peer at it, nose close enough
to smell the iron, the scent of coagulant,
inhaling through slightly parted lips
Soledad Santana
Seen as she’d hung her cranial lantern
from the roof of her step-father’s garden shed,
the parabolic formula was skipped; like two calves, we followed the fence
to the end of the foot-ball pitch.
Claire Harnett-Mann
Behind the block, the night tears in scrub-calls.
Fox kill scores the morning,
ripped by prints in muck.
Hedy Hume
Stepping into the opposing seat
I smile, and the look I receive
Makes me feel the antisocial one.
Matthew F. Amati
Hands said to Head
look what you’ve made me do
it’s not me, Head said, talk to
Heart, that guy’s sick
Mariam Saidan
‘Female singing constitutes a ‘forbidden act’ (ḥarām),
punishable under Article 638 of the Islamic Penal Code.’
Meg Pokrass
This is what happens when she sits alone in her dining room, eating smoked trout and canned sardines.