Today’s choice
Previous poems
Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig
Grief shows me just another sunset
Dusk is dancing & all the visual technologies at hand feel
overwhelmed: mobile eye, pit pastels, graphic card.
It’s down to language, then, imagine.
Above parade pearlescent clouds
looking more permanent than us.
Behind you, incandescent gloaming
rips through time, retina, skin.
This clarity, it blinds the soul, its old familiar.
Listen
how it sings
setting every edge on fire.
Watch
how it streams,
extends, pinks up.
Maybe now you share my sense
of consolation:
that those who went before us,
& who loved us,
those whom we love,
still,
lived
to see this light.
Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig is a translator, editor, and author. Her poetry publications include the pamphlet kinscapes and the anthology The Joy of Living (both with Dreich). Her work has appeared in various publications, including Poetry Scotland, Dust Poetry, and Neologism.
Peter Devonald
He is bitterest regrets,
dark chocolate, olives and kale,
The Telegraph and Magritte’s
pipe, the treachery of images.
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.
Colin Dardis
I have never climbed a tree,
never broken a bone
and will never walk on water.
May Garner
The house keeps score
in places no one checks any longer.
Sally Spiers
Night’s white noise is over. Day arises
to stillness. Light crouches behind windows
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.
Maryam Alsaeid
Maybe after your bath—
you will sit for a moment,
the towel will hold you close
like a quiet prayer—