Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jennie E. Owen
Then tragedy makes children of us all
and in that last moment
the dead shrug, shake
off their boots, shuffle off
jackets and shirts, watch astounded
as their dresses grow and drop to their feet.
Their bags, their glasses, car keys and phones
clatter far away
scatter in rings too far too reach.
They are all elbows and scuffed knees
naked but covered
in primary crayon-box colours.
Every one of them fidgets
in their little wooden box
skipping through their mother’s hearts
blowing out the birthday candles of her eyes
over and over.
This soft reduction leaves the rest of us open mouthed
too small to see over the counter, full
of questions that cannot be asked
cannot be answered.
Jennie E. Owen has been widely published online, in literary journals and anthologies. She is Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Forward Prize nominated. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing for The Open University and lives in Lancashire with her husband and three children. Jennie is a PGR at MMU, focusing on traumascapes in the north-west of England.
Rhian Thomas
I sit to fumble some intrusion from my shoe.
A shard of stone, no bigger than a thought, its ridged face
cutting like some old lover, like a baby or
an old preacher drumming something that irks like a worn out song
Erwin Arroyo Pérez
Here, in my Manhattan room / insomnia tugs at me like a half-closed taxi door / letting all the echoes in
/ an ambulance carries the last breath of an asthmatic man
Hannah Linden
Formed into darkness
an octopus squeezes around
the spaces of a shipwreck.
Kweku Abimbola
My father walks backwards
better than most walk forward—
so whenever he sewed his steps into the living
room carpet, I rushed to mirror my moon-
walking, until he froze,
froze like he’d been caught
by the beat.
Paul Bavister
We found our eyes first,
as they swirled through fragments
of black jumper, dark pine trees
and an orange sunset sky
Anne Donnellan
I prayed for resurrection
that the sun in the sky
might dance Easter morning.
Philip Gross
Enough of scorch, scald, sore- and rawness.
Sometimes flesh longs for eclipse.
Nick Allen
she told me about the still hours
spent at the coast watching the east
Phil Vernon
Because we were four
and I only had strength to carry one
and knew no other way
I carried the one who called out loudest;
threatened us most.