Today’s choice

Previous poems

Laura Sheahen

 

 

 

Outsider

What is the ancient curse they know that you don’t
Moving along their mouth-lines and their eyebrows
Lowering their lids, tensing their nods or shrugs

No spell has locked their lips but they are silent
Watching you try, watching you fall again

(Jeweled box with hind-heart bloody in its depths
Mirror that will not show a child its face
Quiet are mice and insects in the castle)

The shoulders shrug            the eyes refuse beseeching
And every throat grows closed     Hushed with the secret

Watching you stagger
Watching you try again

 

 

Laura Sheahen is an American poet who spends part of her time in Tunisia. Her poems have been published in PN Review, The Manhattan Review, The Lincoln Review, and other journals. She writes criticism for The New Criterion, ArtsFuse, The Irish Times, and other publications.  lsheahen.substack.com

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. . .

Miriam Swales

I’m waiting for news I don’t want to talk about
and scrolling through old photos to escape.
After some swipes, I see you walking away.

Adam Horovitz

We cannot update you yet, other than to say we are caught
in a doldrums between stations and that your father can wait
as he has been waiting these past two years . . .