Today’s choice

Previous poems

Royal Rhodes

 

 

 

Miles of Memory

The passenger train along the Connecticut shoreline moves as if in a
river of wooden ties and steel rails. It travels through the old
industrial towns like Bridgeport, long ago a manufacturer of brass,
and places settled in New England’s past: Old Saybrook, Groton, and
Mystic. Once I rode north during a quick thunderstorm and witnessed
from the window of a coach car the tangled cables of lightning
attaching the sky to the ground. But mostly my travels were on dry,
calm days when I could look out on sun whitened wetlands and woods,
with occasional glimpses of flocks of boats moored not far from access
to the placid Sound beyond. As I journeyed alone, I saw In the train
window a white stick in the marsh — a rigid egret.

 

 

Royal Rhodes is a poet trained in the Classics. His work has appeared in various literary journals in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada. He lives in a village near a nature conservancy and a green cemetery. royalrhodes.com

Anne Ryland

Restless two-hundred-year-old village elder,
a ragged playground of words, or is it weeds –
fragments of chant to slaps of skipping rope.

Tim Brookes

In the charity shop I try on a coat
flocked with fake shearling,
shaved-soft almost: fibres
fired onto plastic to fool the wrist.

Kim Waters

You’re a character, a Roman numeral,
an internet meme. Descendant
from a peasant’s crook or cattle prod,
you’re the twelfth letter of the alphabet,

Sylvie Jane Lewis

Being quiet and easily tired by being alive among people, I take
the cowardly route to community. I curate a digital garden of oddity.

At best my phone is a menagerie of queers: trinket makers, amateur
playwrights, witches, and, over and over again, my own personal monarchy.