Today’s choice

Previous poems

Kathleen Gray

 

 

 

Liberty

When she asked what I wanted
to be when I grew up, my mother
laughed when I said ‘free’

She’s been dead for more than
thirty years – not much freedom
in her kitchen-sink life

She settled for snatching time out,
pausing with that dreamy look,
that secret smile,

knife in one hand, half-scraped
carrot for Thursday’s soup
in the other, oblivious

to me spying from the kitchen
door, wondering where she
escaped to and if one day

she’d decide to take off
her apron, leave us free to
cook our own soup.

 

 

Kathleen Gray is Scottish by birth, French by adoption. Her poems have been published in various literary magazines, including New Feathers, Drawn to the Light, The Alchemy Spoon, London Grip, Poetry Scotland and Causeway. She lives in Paris

Martin Fisher

Inside, in the half-light, the iron rot took hold.
Forgotten service–obsolete.
Salt-coin neglect.

The money flowed inland,
Moored on an hourglass choke.
No one told the sea.

Amirah Al Wassif

Beneath my armpit lives a Sinbad the size of a thumb.
His imagination feeds through an umbilical cord tied to my womb.
Now and then, people hear him speaking through a giant microphone—
Singing,
Cracking jokes,

Mark Smith

In the portacabin that morning, men smoked
and looked at last week’s paper again.
There was no water to fill the urn.
The first job – to get connected