Today’s choice
Previous poems
Martin Mooney
Lapse
Graffiti artists, known as writers, are often misunderstood by society.
Eden Magazine
The footbridge was skinned in graffiti – slogans, threats,
declarations of love, swastikas. Grek. Kost. Lapse.
I’d assumed lapse was a tag, a nom de plume or guerre, but
as the morning drags itself towards noon the word
has surfaced and resurfaced: lapse, lapse, lapse. Noun
or verb? Am I instructed? Warned? By lunchtime
I wonder if it’s even word at all, perhaps the writer
just sprayed shapes that look like L A P S E by fluke.
And by mid-afternoon it’s drained of sense, a dazed
semantic husk, so that as I cross the bridge again
I whisper it to myself as virgin sound, unsaid till now:
brute air lip-shaped, a world in a kind of freefall.
Martin Mooney is the author of four collections – Grub (1993), Rasputin and his Children (2000), Blue Lamp Disco (2003) and The Resurrection of the Body at Killysuggen (2011). A New and Selected is due from Greenwich Exchange later in 2026
Jason Ryberg
Still Life of Fish and Bird
Mark McDonnell
Fascinated by the priest’s teeth I don’t realise
I’m kicking the pew in front with a restless foot
until someone taps me sharply on the knee.
James Mason
In Italian I have no inner life.
With no past or future tense
My needs are immediate.
Claire Miller
rose is thirsty
rose senses water
rose root rummages in the earth
rose root punctures lung and frontal lobe
rose stem is a green straw sucking
Sylvia Banham
Pigeons have invaded the garden, two then four, then a flock.
They roost in the apple tree to nest, reconnoitre or mate
ignore my sorties to deter them and shit without stint
on patio and herb bed, foul lovely hyssop and thyme.
Daniel Naawenkangua Abukuri
What matters now is the feast of this survival.
The glory of our own light, black light.
Look at us: the deeper the root, the sweeter the juice.
Glory of the blacker berry, split wide open to the sun.
Robert Billinski
the sky met the water where the birds met the fish
the sky met the water where the fish met the birds
the sky met the birds where the water met the fish
Gordon Vells
Impotent in family life and ineffectual at work,
sometimes he would spend a full quarter-hour
just circulating the mini-roundabout on his moped,
dizzy from the power of blocking everyone else.
Patrick Wright
i protest say how when i’m gone i’d like to rest before the choice to return & go through
all this again you sigh as though that’s absurd & endings are just endings we’re mulch
& nothing but endless fucking