Today’s choice
Previous poems
Kim Waters
Letter to L
You’re a character, a Roman numeral,
an internet meme. Descendant
from a peasant’s crook or cattle prod,
you’re the twelfth letter of the alphabet,
but missing from a baker’s dozen.
You’re in every email I ever wrote,
appearing in April and July,
but lying dormant in other months.
You bookend the linguistic paradox
of logical and lateral thinking.
I hear your lisp in silence, conjuring
something glamorous in lapis lazuli.
You’re the difference between
the flight and fight response,
the one that can’t leave one alone.
You’ve been known to double down
on bullshit, rollbacks and collusion,
but at the core you’re mellow
and although not easily heard,
you always walk the talk.
L, let’s face it, life begins with you.
Kim Waters lives in Melbourne, Australia. She has a Master of Arts in creative writing. She is currently completing an Advanced Diploma of Visual Arts. Her poems have appeared in The Australian, Acumen, The Shanghai Literary Review, Under the Radar, The Wells Street Journal, Marble and La Piccioletta Barca.
Chris Emery
and if we walk to the same sea later
we’ll see something heaving up beside us:
caskets of grey, white-capped, barren and loose,
the way memories are.
T. N. Kennedy
so you collect those poems which reveal
life at its most intense and solitary
turning them on when you most need to feel
Mariah Whelan
St Ann’s Square Manchester, 23rd May 2017 Because I cannot show you what is at the centre of all this I will lay language up to its edge, walk its edges the way I moved through the back of the crowd too afraid to go in. I had to shade my eyes from...
Marissa Glover
What Might Have Been There is a small white house high on a green hill just south of Scotland, an office bright with books and a window overlooking Magdalene, and somewhere on a dirt road between endless pastures of strong red fescue, is a man on a...
Cherry Doyle
/ on the days / blood rushes at the corner of a nail / you cannot keep your jumper off the door handle / table tackles leg / expect the bruise in two days’ time / pansies nodding in speckles of rain /
Jennie E. Owen
and in that last moment
the dead shrug, shake
off their boots, shuffle off
jackets and shirts,
Martin Figura for Mental Health Awareness Week
Children in care do not have much of a voice, they often accept whatever is given and do not dare to speak up.
Julie Stevens for Mental Health Awareness Week
Are these the words you want me to say
about how my day became a raging river
crashing through my bones?
Fianna Russell Dodwell for Mental Health Awareness Week
I’ll tell you a bedtime story . . .