Today’s choice
Previous poems
David Sapp
Aimless
Aimless between
Dropping out
Of art school
And absolutely no
Friggin’ money
For Kenyon
I moved in with
Television and doting
Grandma in flowered
Wallpapered rooms
Sat on her porch
Back and forth
On the glider
That Grandpa and I
Hauled home
From the auction
And for hours
Watched a robin’s trip
From yard to nest
Feeding her chicks
Delicious worms
And that was enough
Until ambition
Set in again
David Sapp, writer and artist, lives along the southern shore of Lake Erie in North America. A Pushcart nominee, he was awarded Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Grants for poetry and art. His poetry and prose appear widely in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Asia. His publications include articles in the Journal of Creative Behavior; chapbooks Solitary Nature, Cardboard Pleasure and Two Buddha; a novel, Flying Over Erie; a book of poems and drawings, Drawing Nirvana; and two books of poetry and prose, Acquaintances and a memoir titled The Origin of Affection, winner of the Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award.
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. . .
Maxine Sibihwana
here, water does not run. instead it
sits obediently in old plastic containers
Lesley Curwen
Her feet snagged in a cleverly-placed net
my sister waits for him to untangle her,
to hold her head still between thick fingers . . .
From the Archives: In Memory of Jean Cardy
Denizens Mice live in the London Tube. A train leaves and small pieces of sooty black detach themselves from the sooty black walls and forage for crumbs in the rubbish under the rails that are death to man. You can’t see their feet move. They...