Today’s choice
Previous poems
Gail Webb
Something Missing
He cuts. I lie still, teach myself
to dream of St David’s Bay,
seaweed strewn on incoming tides,
surfers slice big waves in half.
He butchers with hammer, saw.
No nightmares, though he says
it’s possible-you could wake
in the middle of the operation,
stirred by loud banging. I advise
him to knock me out good
and proper. We both know the truth,
he will take something from me,
cut flesh away, file bone, move
kneecap, sever nerves, tendons.
He promises to replace pain
with a super joint, a hero.
I come round, crying, smell
of blood and piss. The body knows
muscle and bone are gone.
For months, messages arrive
in my brain, something’s missing.
He does not acknowledge,
it’s part of my DNA now, this loss.
Oz Hardwick
The ghost of my mother knows the names of everything, but
she can’t tell me, because ghosts, whatever you have heard
to the contrary, can’t speak.
McLord Selasi
I walk the flat barefoot,
step over old dreams
still curled like cats
in the corners.
Warren Mortimer
& you’ll understand if i leave open this theatre of air
not as the invite for another loss
but to honour their world unwilling to collapse
Jena Woodhouse
Language reinvents itself,
coruscates in signs on walls;
falls silent, mute as clay and stone
on tablets that enshrine its form.
Martin Rieser
The river is an old demon
& my heart is an infirm creature
The river is sure of its way
& my heart is capable of lies.
Sreeja Naskar
glass-tooth morning.
salt mouth.
i left the stove on just to feel wanted.
Gordan Struić
Still —
I kept
writing.
Sometimes
just:
“Hi.”
Margaret Poynor-Clark
Inside my bedroom I take a fresh blade
pull off my jumper, examine the ladder
in front of the mirror cut through my laces
rung by rung
Jenny Hockey
That’s when she went to ground,
after she disobeyed, painted her plastic tea set
red, hidden away in the playhouse they built
down where bindweed draped