Today’s choice
Previous poems
Colin Dardis
Mausoleum
A house is a machine for living in.- Le Corbusier
I have never climbed a tree,
never broken a bone
and will never walk on water.
I open my little window
and worry about possibilities:
imprudent intruders
of bird or cat, the wind, the cold.
The sky often tells me
when it’s time to close up again.
Some days, the house
is where you do your dying.
The true living waits outside.
Colin Dardis is a writer and editor from Northern Ireland. He edits the Poem Alone blog, and is co-host of Purely Poetry, an open mic night in Belfast. His recent collections are My Life Is A Film I Haven’t Yet Watched (Buttonhook Press, 2025), and with the lakes (above/ground press, 2024). www.colindardispoet.co.uk
Ansuya Patel
Women scrape coins from their purse,
count pennies, one lifts up a watermelon
in mid-air like raising a newborn to light.
Pippa Little
a woman’s rage cannot raise the dead
but it may split stone like lightning
Abiodun Salako
a boy grows tired
of dying again and again.
i am building him a morgue
for Thanksgiving.
Patrick Wright
It’s as if the dream
is telling me we are still joined
somehow, despite waking
and me trudging on, even though
your voicemail is off, your locks
changed.
William Collins
We carry the shame of Paragraph 352D
folded into suitcases at foreign borders,
where love is questioned like a crime,
and disbelief stamped heavier than visas.
They tell us to run for our lives —
but only if we can do it quietly.
Oz Hardwick
The ghost of my mother knows the names of everything, but
she can’t tell me, because ghosts, whatever you have heard
to the contrary, can’t speak.
McLord Selasi
I walk the flat barefoot,
step over old dreams
still curled like cats
in the corners.
Warren Mortimer
& you’ll understand if i leave open this theatre of air
not as the invite for another loss
but to honour their world unwilling to collapse
Jena Woodhouse
Language reinvents itself,
coruscates in signs on walls;
falls silent, mute as clay and stone
on tablets that enshrine its form.