Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jane Frank
Wake
The leaves are a colour you’ve never seen
but that I will learn to expect
and there’s a fracas-induced full moon,
clouds beneath like soot
from giant candles.
I woke up and the time ahead was missing
like Notre Dame’s gothic power
and the spots gone from a baby giraffe
born in a zoo in Tennessee.
Today I walked into a gelato-coloured
building and talked about search
engine optimisation, unfamiliar syntax
and the fact that Marcel Proust
wrote a 601-word-long run-on
sentence in In Search of Lost Time
and now I am squeezing the moon like
a stress ball in my fingers as stars fly.
There’s a person-shaped hole
in the centre of me where you ran through,
strings of words like a wake behind you.
Jane Frank is a prize-winning Australian poet, editor and academic. Her most recent collection is Gardening on Mars (Shearsman Books, 2025) and two earlier collections were published by Calanthe Press. Read more of her work at https://www.facebook.com/JaneFrankPoet/
Joseph Blythe
I swear I felt the swirly patterned paper
rip from the walls of my childhood bedroom.
It was the same stained cream shade as my skin –
pockmarked, cut and scabbed, dry and peeling…..
Denise Bundred
Shadowed boats bereft of sail
absorb the surge and slap
constrained by a blue-grey chink
of mooring chains.
Rahma O. Jimoh
A bird skirts across the fence
& I rush to the window
to behold its flapping wings—
It’s been ages
since I last saw a bird.
Samuel A. Adeyemi
I can already hear the chorus of my tribe.
They want the ancient blade,
the guillotine that hovered
above my head like a halo of death.
Mofiyinfoluwa O.
when you
know that your time with someone has almost run out, that is what you do. you look for
tiny things buried in the sand so that you do not have to look at the huge broken thing
standing between you both.
Chris Emery
and if we walk to the same sea later
we’ll see something heaving up beside us:
caskets of grey, white-capped, barren and loose,
the way memories are.
T. N. Kennedy
so you collect those poems which reveal
life at its most intense and solitary
turning them on when you most need to feel
Mariah Whelan
St Ann’s Square Manchester, 23rd May 2017 Because I cannot show you what is at the centre of all this I will lay language up to its edge, walk its edges the way I moved through the back of the crowd too afraid to go in. I had to shade my eyes from...
Marissa Glover
What Might Have Been There is a small white house high on a green hill just south of Scotland, an office bright with books and a window overlooking Magdalene, and somewhere on a dirt road between endless pastures of strong red fescue, is a man on a...