Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jasmine Gibbs
Messages, Signs, Codes
This morning – Blackstar,
Bowie, those jazz swan songs
sputtering from the CD player,
wild trumpets that convulse
through negative space. Funny,
coincidences like that; awoke
to a bonewrong feeling,
my senses pricked like
antennae cosmically tuned.
Tried not to believe them:
messages, signs, codes –
but then the news Kim
effervescent, ephemeral,
a supernova burned out
in a hospice, long knelled
but refusing The End
as foretold, far too busy
to die, far too gorgeous.
And then I am back
at my shelf, dusting a finger
over cased spines, lingering
at those dark auto-eulogies
by accident? By chance?
watching blackthorns spurt
their nectared nebulae,
crocuses, tulips, daffodils
holding out against the late
frost, a warble of robins
fluttering from the tarmac
like tiny Houdinis only
just escaping the killing
crunch of wheels,
whilst I exhale
smoke signals from out
my kitchen window.
Jasmine Gibbs is a poet from Great Yarmouth. Her work can be found in The London Magazine, And Other Poems, Gutter, and Ambient Receiver.
Jacob Mckibbin
my brother saw his attacker
at a petrol station
Janet Hatherley
He’s ten years older than he’d said, which makes him
twenty-eight years older, not eighteen.
Syed Anas S
We are the ones
who see big crackers
burst every day—
Dharmavadana
She barely glances at you when you chink
your spare coins in her upturned cap, but still
spreads a spell among the pavement footfalls,
Tim Dwyer
Shedding Annamakerrig It begins high up the chestnut tree with leaves on the twigs on the tips of branches where sap has slowed. Turning amber carried by the breeze they touch the earth, rest on the grass where autumn begins Tim...
Gopal Lahiri
From this far-side apartment
you watch jarul leaves darkening with the seasons
Adam Kelly
Determined, you smash against the window
I have to admire you in your striped suit
Sandra Noel
The sea happens to me today
not because I’m the woman in the bakers
brusque turned rude
or the peaches still hard in the bowl
Grace Lynn
Sunlight saunters in long, thin wires through the fallow field
of my bedroom. You approach, a migrating heron
in a runny yolk collar and suntanned shorts, a white-light emissary
of hope. . .