Today’s choice
Previous poems
James Mason
Beginner’s Italian
In Italian I have no inner life.
With no past or future tense
My needs are immediate.
I have hunger. I eat.
I have thirst. I drink.
I have the name for wine not peas.
The heat is good. I want.
Yes, I sleep well, thank you.
But I pass a dreamless night.
I am appetite. A thing of flesh.
More, it says. Again.
I do not know how to say enough.
James Mason lives in Worcestershire, UK. He has an MA in Creative Writing from the Open University.
Paula R. Hilton
When the genie appears, I’m in a frivolous
mood. First request? My mom’s apple pie.
Alice Huntley
slack in a bag from the freezer aisle
shaken out like shrunken grey memes
I long for the podding of beans
Rhonda Melanson
The magic of growing things, its tangible beauty, I did not understand.
Clive Donovan
I go to the top of the risen hill,
above the trees, beyond the grass,
where only hard ground lives
Gary Akroyde
We searched for it
through the tarmac in every rain-bruised sky
in dark Pennine shadows where great mills
spewed out ringlets of ghost-grey fog
Nathan Curnow
I like to think it’s a story about himself and Einstein
floating in zero gravity, Albert sailing through the capsule
toward his drifting pipe, Brian playing We Will Rock You—
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,