Today’s choice
Previous poems
Rob A. Mackenzie
Sea Lily
after Alison McWhirter
Everything is moving. I have to remind myself
it’s a flat canvas and behind it a wall that’s solid
as I am.
Although three quarters of my heart,
and one third of my bones, are water. Which
explains a lot.
Appearance can be deceptive
sometimes, but never here. I root among
many layers: clouds of mustard, pink ribbons,
haloes of smoke, lightning streaks, the sea
lily on its stalk, fragile in depth
plant-like
animal, I’ve swum into this shapeshifting
world, no longer quite sure of what I was
or might become.
Everything that matters
in art resists all explanation, but is bound
to emerge anyway, and to keep emerging.
Rob A. Mackenzie has published two poetry pamphlets and four full collections, the latest being Woof! Woof! Woof! (Salt Publishing, 2023). His work has been translated into French, Italian, Serbian and Czech. He founded and runs Blue Diode Press. bluediode.co.uk
Jane Thomas
Taking HRT at The Neon Sign Museum, Las Vegas Popped tubes and leaking neon. Lucky, Golden Gate, Circus-Circus, half illuminated Happy Days. Scorching pinks turned to blues, stiletto heels snapped to slippers, bright night shine, dull by dusk. The...
Cat Turhan
Hand-shell After Dora Maar Divide a woman’s body into geometric shapes. Triangle tits, a six-pointed star. Segment a woman’s face into orange slices. Split it through a spider’s web. Float a woman in a pool. Swim statue-stiff, your hand-shell on...
Robert Nisbet
The Fringe For days, weeks, I’d longed quite hard for silence, as the weighted ache of noise loured. Then, Sunday morning, three o’clock, humid morning-night, the window open, there came a silence fringed with scents (our lane half-in, half-out of...
Steph Ellen Feeney
The brief invisibility of fathers I do not draw but here I do. Heavy looping lines. That scar of road. Weeds through the stones. The olive tree, persisting. Wild fennel, and him bent over it. The way that he inhales the leaves. Pours rice like...
John Tustin
We Are Alike We are alike, you and me. We are alike. You die of love, I die of love. You die without love, I die without love. We live to love, We live without love, We live until we die And then You must die alone, I must die alone. You and me,...
Chrissy Banks
The Nearly Times Once, when a group of horses bolted and reared, eyes white, legs flailing, trampling whatever was under their hooves. Once, wheeling too fast on a bike down Richmond Hill, tumbling off. Stilled on the tarmac, a human speed bump....
Kashiana Singh
5 Haiku Origami cradle songs on the drive home… my empty womb * my mother’s knitted sweaters- I unravel knots * tears- water raining into an empty cup * drifting snowflakes- I restore the fragile lace of my wedding veil * encounters- his world is shaped by her...
Adaeze Onwuelo
Every Girl's Dream White egg dress black shoe suit doughnut sugary ring thrown flinty dandruff and white rice copy and pasted vows wedding receptionists are only here for the liquor vacancy signs is their twin eyes a head dress of heaven? A...
Peter Bickerton
Conspiracy theorists As they conspire, I agonise: it’s a glass door sudden at full pelt and that sickness as the wind escapes. Peter Bickerton is a writer, scientist and resident poet for Thought For Food. Peter’s poetry has featured...