Today’s choice
Previous poems
Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal
Art Exhibit
I hear the roar of
the ocean. I hear
a series of shrieks
and long screams.
An eventual lull
comes. My ears
are an abstraction.
I don’t know what
to tell you. Last
night a spider made
its way inside my
ear. It crawled out
with fragments of
wax. I hear the
possibilities of the
thought of a spider,
of a stranger, but
I am unsure of it.
My ear is a triangle.
I hear coughing sounds.
I hear myself laugh,
the grinding of teeth,
the tracing of circles.
My ear is a square.
These are my dreams.
I’m an art exhibit
with wounds I unstitch.
Soon my time will come.
Quick, turn off the lights.
Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal was born in Mexico, lives in California, and works in the mental health field in Los Angeles. His poems have appeared in Blue Collar Review, Fixator Press, Ink, Sweat, and Tears, Lothlorien Poetry Review, and Oddball Magazine. His latest poetry book, Make the Water Laugh, was published by Rogue Wolf Press.
Rose Ramsden
We left the play early. It was the last day before the start of secondary school. Dad told me off for slapping the seats
Seán Street
There was a time when I took my radio
into the night wood and tuned its pyracantha
needle along the dial through noise jungles
to silent darkness at the waveband’s end.
J.S. Dorothy
Find yourself by the lake,
its icy membrane split by the long
arrow of a skein, reflected
flurry of wings, cries
bawling.
Sarah Rowland Jones
The terns lift as one
from the salt-pools behind the beach
– a thick undulating line
Jean O’Brien
Winter soil is hard and hoar crusted,
birds peck with blunted beaks,
pushing up are the blind green pods
of what will soon be yellow daffodils,
given light and air.
Jean Atkin
We scoured the parish tip most weeks, when we were kids.
We clambered it in wellies. Ferals, we scavenged
in the debris of the adults’ lives.
Sally Festing
Life lines still arc round the base of each thumb
though the bulk of hand’s muscle mass
Joe Crocker
There was always, of course, the cold
– its freezing pretty fingerprints on our side of the pane.
Julie Sheridan
They married in a chapel of black steel
bars, tethered up their feathers to serve as
stained glass. . .