Today’s choice
Previous poems
David Van-Cauter
House
…4am and the birdsong begins, a wet January in a new city and I’m alone watching a man in Minnesota, murdered for protecting a woman from a fascist hit squad and the politicians are smirking trying to deny the evidence, saying no it didn’t happen that way, the video is wrong and I’m thinking of you in the crisis house trying to sleep because you said our home was trying to kill you, how it isn’t you, it’s where you are and how the place is a hellhole where the drains are blocked and everything is broken but I don’t see it and you feel sorry for me being blind to all the unresolvable unfixable problems and you keep saying it over and over and you can’t live here you cannot live here it’s all fucked it’s all fucked and I watch the man being killed again by ICE from a different angle after the pepper spray and the beating and he’s saying no, leave her alone and those are his last words as they shoot him ten times and I’m wondering if we’ll ever be the way we were or if this is it now, reality shot down in a hail of bullets as our world accepts that nothing is true any more, that this did not happen and it could not happen here, not here, where we know what is right and who the enemies are, but it’s not you, no, it’s the house, it’s just the house, and if we didn’t live here then everything would no longer be broken, we’d have no home but at least we’d have our lives back and there wouldn’t be all this confusion but you’re not here now and the man lies still again and then he is alive saying no no no and the bullets hit and the man lies and the man lies and the man lies still…
Andrew Tucker Leavis
as the tanker tore
its throat against the
shallow spine, as
the village unravelled
Patricia Minson
Between the trees dust shifts,
light fractures like a prism.
A cathedral silence greens the air.
B. Anne Adriaens
The French term terrain vague enfolds
a plot of land I thought at first was vague,
undefined and malleable.
John Bartlett
mornings
I wake wary
of abundance
wondering why I’m still here
and then I recall
all the green leaves
with their hiding birds
Maya Little
I’m trying to stop thinking about what I want to not // be. Sometimes I have looked into my heart and found that // everything’s packed up.
Liz Byrne
I want to be two-tongued again
To go back to the time when I slipped
from one language to another with ease,
Matthew Thorpe-Coles
You retreat back to your bedroom,
your headset cooler than any
sunlight . . .
S Reeson
only now is it apparent how
dishonouring a body is a crime
Paul Connolly
At Aber Falls
he felt nothing
water sheeted
past grottoes
snakes of tributary
lazed along