Today’s choice
Previous poems
Royal Rhodes
Miles of Memory
The passenger train along the Connecticut shoreline moves as if in a
river of wooden ties and steel rails. It travels through the old
industrial towns like Bridgeport, long ago a manufacturer of brass,
and places settled in New England’s past: Old Saybrook, Groton, and
Mystic. Once I rode north during a quick thunderstorm and witnessed
from the window of a coach car the tangled cables of lightning
attaching the sky to the ground. But mostly my travels were on dry,
calm days when I could look out on sun whitened wetlands and woods,
with occasional glimpses of flocks of boats moored not far from access
to the placid Sound beyond. As I journeyed alone, I saw In the train
window a white stick in the marsh — a rigid egret.
Royal Rhodes is a poet trained in the Classics. His work has appeared in various literary journals in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada. He lives in a village near a nature conservancy and a green cemetery. royalrhodes.com
Craig Dobson
Out of morning
a misted light,
glowing fire
in the air.
Steven Taylor
A very long time ago
Stephen Fry’s godfather, the
Justice, Sir Oliver Popplewell
Who chaired the inquiry
Into the Bradford City
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
Toby Cotton
A blustery day –
the wind too strong for kites
or for lifts to the sky.
“To a thoughtful spot,” it cites
and pins me to the earth.
Ansuya Patel
except this burnt red vase.
Hand shaped in the muffled roar,
devouring flame in the furnace’s mouth.
Hannah Ward
Look, Drew, the
plums are in
pieces beneath
us. I dreamt:
Andrea Small
a flower is not a heron
does not stand on one leg
spear-billed over golden carp
Usha Kishore
At dawn and dusk, my father
becomes a chant, that flies above
the courtyard of the old house