Today’s choice

Previous poems

Jim Murdoch

 

 

 

Observer Effect V
Ephemeral should be the default – Evan Spiegel

I said,
“This is wrong”
and they said,
“No, it just is,”
and I said,
“I understand,”
and I did, ishly,
“But isness isn’t
a valid method of
mensuration.
Presence, maybe.”

“You mean being?”
they said,
“Isn’t that another
way of ising?”
And I said,
“What?” and then
“Oh,” and then
“Ah!” and then I
hmmed for a bit
by which time
everything had
all gone a bit
mooty and wasy
anyway.

 

Jim Murdoch: Scot, gatophile, honorary woman, classical music aficionado, novelist and producer of half-to-three-quarter-(and-occasionally-actually-fully)-decent poems for over half a century.

Beth Davies, Fee Marshall and Fiona Broadhurst for Day 2 of our Pride Feature

Trick Question

It was a simple game.
One wall meant Yes. The other meant No.
The teacher would ask a question and we’d each run towards our answer.

Once, she asked “Have you ever been in love?”
At six years old, I ran with certainty towards Yes.
I reached it but found myself alone.
Surprised, I looked over at the others
crowded together on the other side.
“Don’t you love your parents?” I asked,
with all the indignance of a child
who doesn’t understand her mistake.
“Don’t you love your friends?”

Beth Davies

Ace Sex

Sex is when a train runs into a portal
Flies off to outer space
It’s when you suddenly remember the old block tellie
With no channels
That you had to switch on at the block
Sex is
I think it’s an ice cream
One of them novelty flavours like
Popping Raspberry Unicorn
It’s a weird fad but we’re pretty sure
Salted Caramel’s making a comeback

Fee Marshall

Polyamory is wrong
(Mixing Greek and Latin roots? Wrong!)

Polyamory is less orgies, or threesomes
& more Google calendar, blocking out
precious time, increments of love
portioned out as slices of 3.14159,
infinite, neverending & always fulfilling

Fiona Broadhurst

Lara Mae Simpson and Siobhan Dunlop for Day 1 of our Pride Feature

How to Love the Word “Lesbian”

We took the bus in tutus & fairy wings,
gripped on to the cowboy hat
trying to fly from your curls in July’s breeze.
In Trafalgar Square, floats of rainbow
companies waltzed by & we rolled
our eyes, couldn’t see past tall men,

– Lara Mae Simpson (they/she)

On nights I am

a girl again
I am unemployable as
woman don’t do the
work beg  at corner
of ends on leg
too short for the cripwalk

-Noah Jacob

dreaming of the velvet goldmines

i want to be a skinny pretty boy rockstar
without the height or the coke habit
or needing to strictly be a boy at all

-Siobhan Dunlop (they/them)

Paul Stephenson

The Conversation

It’s been quite a while now and…
You know we get on like a house…
August twelfth, a year ago, can you…
I bet you thank your lucky…
Things have evolved, haven’t…
Can you believe we’re both still …

Hannah Linden

She gives me a word to look up
in a dictionary of obscure sorrows.

I, who try to decipher echoes from
other people’s reaction to my words

throw down a bucket into the well
recognise water when people tell me

Nelly Bryce

Longing curls its legs up on the sofa in our house.
There’s a dip there now.
How I long to turn us into a day trip.

You belong in that chair over there
asking what happened with that text
and where I bought this jumper,