Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jeff Skinner
Hamlet in the Scanner
Can’t hear yourself think only the bass line
of a heart thumping. Your head’s clamped.
You can’t move. A panic button slicks
a palm, a soft wet plum. You could be
bounded in a nutshell and count yourself a king
of infinite space if not for this death metal
soundtrack banging in your ears.
Is the rest silence? Wriggling fingers,
toes, fingers, you fidget and flex, as you will –
for anything to do. Otherwise you’re
paralysed with angst. If Ophelia should come
she would not see you as you see yourself –
someone whose life is being examined
whose breath’s short, who swallows his spit.
Did your gaolers slip off for a smoke –
leave you in your ship going nowhere?
Outside, a summer’s day you can’t get to:
more undreamt things, other voices.
Jeff Skinner‘s poems are widely published, most recently in Atrium, Underbelly Press, Black Nore Review, The Aftershock Review. His pamphlet, Us, was shortlisted for the Live Canon pamphlet prize. In July 2023 he was diagnosed with a neuro-degenerative condition.
Paul Short
Sleep.
Elusive as lucid dreams.
Closed eyes teem wotsit-orange,
spiderweb scarlet &
thatch-brown
Ash Bowden
Out again with the pitchfork churning
compost into the old green bin, stinking
and silent as an ancient earthen vat.
Mallika Bhaumik
This is not a frilly, mushy love letter
to a city whose allure lies in defying all labels and holding the mystery key to a man’s heart, though none has ever been able to lay an absolute claim on it,
Jena Woodhouse
Around midnight, the hour when pain
reasserts its dominance, a voice
behind the curtain screening
my bed from the next patient’s:
an intonation penetrating abstract thoughts
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.