Today’s choice
Previous poems
Morgan Harlow
Notes after a walk: a tree that had caught its own fallen limb
She hadn’t lost a child but if she had she imagined it would be like that.
To hear footsteps running up behind you, and to turn around and no
one there. To see a crow gliding under the trees, a crane fly skittering on
the gravel driveway. Apple trees with fallen-off branches, why oh why.
The pattern of white under the tree, she had not recognized at first. Fall-
en petals.
Morgan Harlow’s work appears or is forthcoming in Elm Leaves Journal, Folio Literary Journal, Ink Sweat & Tears, Louisiana Literature, North Dakota Quarterly, Sierra Nevada Review, Poetry Salzburg Review and other journals. She teaches writing in Madison, Wisconsin and is the author of the poetry collection Midwest Ritual Burning.
Martin Figura for Mental Health Awareness Week
Children in care do not have much of a voice, they often accept whatever is given and do not dare to speak up.
Julie Stevens for Mental Health Awareness Week
Are these the words you want me to say
about how my day became a raging river
crashing through my bones?
Fianna Russell Dodwell for Mental Health Awareness Week
I’ll tell you a bedtime story . . .
William Manning for Mental Health Awareness Week
My room is infested with bedbugs
I’m covered in bites, not love bites
Anna Brook
I want to borrow gods
(as Adrienne does,
though she knew better)
their sad logic
their templates
Nigel King
Turn the mud. Bo Peep’s head tumbles out,
wide-eyed, mouth a little open.
Mohsen Hosseinkhani translated by Tahereh Forsat Safai
Men are the color of soil
Women are sitting on the ashes
Stephen Komarnyckyj
you are the shadow slipping through the mirror
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.