Today’s choice

Previous poems

Salvatore Difalco

 

 

 

Eek, Eyck

No green swell this evening
will detach me from my hat.

No hand held out gingerly
will bend my frozen elbow.

Next door, the goldfinch
on the box turns and chirps.

Hounds outside hunt fox
or men who play God.

My face is not as pale
as yours and yet so pale.

Tell me, is your green
dress of cotton or of wool?

If wool you must beware
of wolves mistaking you.

The little dog on the floor
looks like furry slippers.

Fruit on the window sill
looks ripe enough to eat.

Yet your rosary hangs from
a rusty nail like a noose.

No swell is mine to claim.
My name will not be signed.

Withdraw your pallid hand.
The hounds are at the door.

 

 

Salvatore Difalco is a Sicilian Canadian poet and short story writer currently living in Toronto, Canada. His poems and stories have appeared in many journals.

Opeyemi Oluwayomi

They are piercing knife between
the city, detaching the body from the head,
& squeezing the blood out of the flesh,
so there can be an end to what hasn’t begun.

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

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