Today’s choice
Previous poems
Marc Janssen
Salem January IV
The sky opens
Blinking its single slackened eye.
It grumbly gets up.
Before shuttering again and whatever blue was there
Is gone.
It’s gone again.
What is there left to say about Marc Janssen? Maybe, his verse is scattered around the world in places like Pinyon, Orbis, Pure Slush, Cirque Journal, and Poetry Salzburg also in his book November Reconsidered. Janssen coordinates the Salem Poetry Project and keeps getting nominated for Oregon Poet Laureate.
Martin Potter
glimmer blades
the field’s lightly fogged
grass green
Moira McPartlin
Outside the Berber tent
the poet and I contemplate
the boundless Sahara sky.
Matthew James Friday
We totem our empires with the raptor,
weave into flags, fix on coins
but what of the victims?
How come no one ever glories the fish . . .
Ansuya Patel
Think what it must have been like for her
fasting from sunrise to moonrise, to wake up
three hours before dawn, bathe, apply sindoor
on the parting of her hair line . . .
Chris Beckett
Zerihun drove him over the dead-cow hills and Bob’s long hair stood up with shock at what he saw.
Angela France
Driving into low cloud everything fades
to a blur, all colour and definition leached
David Van-Cauter
Two calls this morning – flood of tears…
She cannot eat a single thing they give her.
Dan Stathers
A long way from the quags of Nova Scotia,
stowaway beneath the cherry laurel thicket,
more triffid than cabbage . . .
Sarah L Dixon’
I fall in love with Leeds Coach Station, Holts pints,
a shared fish supper from Arkwrights.