Today’s choice
Previous poems
Rebecca Cohen
Why don’t you eat pork?
If you don’t believe in God, my friend says,
why don’t you eat pork?
I have no answer for her. I have only
the blue-tacked mezuzah stuck to the doorway of my bedroom,
the dried wax still wedged in stubborn clots
on each branch of a bronze menorah,
the framed parsha, hooked onto a bent nail
crowding the far wall of my living room.
I have only the memory of a six-year-old
who sat on the floor at Ohel Leah
and hummed along to the davening,
cradling a wooden cat in her lap.
Her braided hair was longer than mine, her eyes wider.
But my mother always says, if she squints,
we share the same smile.
Rebecca Cohen is a poet based in London. Her work has appeared in West Branch, Across the Margin, and The Lincoln Review and she received her MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway, University of London.
Graham Clifford
Check the cavities in you where hurt goes,
exactly the right shape to house an insult
like a power tool snug and clipped in its case.
Gill Horitz
I woke to workers with blades
along the verge, yellow-jacketed
to signify contracted rights
Anita Karla Kelly, CE Collins, Clare Painter on International Women’s Day
In the beginning of the end she bit the thing she wasn’t meant to bite.
Apple stuck in her throat, one bite taken, then swallowed whole.
Elaine Baker
To my Ovaries
My cahoonas. My muscular daisies.
Potent white olives. You make me sick.
Jan FitzGerald
What is not to love
when you draw back curtains
and taste clouds
in their newness and innocence
Helen Finney
At my feet the window sprawls a view of kneaded land,
craggy baked by the hand of the gods, dusted green
with short bit grass.
Eugene O’Hare
It hasn’t been this bright all year –
the moon’s white scalp, spot-lit,
a head turned away from a thing
the rest of us fear: unearthly dark
Juliet Humphreys
Though I am not a painter
this is to be a portrait
of my parents and my sister.
Julian Dobson
You too I guess
have studied the surviving starlings
as they swoop and whistle
by the snack trailer at Moorfoot