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.
Nick Allen
she told me about the still hours
spent at the coast watching the east
Phil Vernon
Because we were four
and I only had strength to carry one
and knew no other way
I carried the one who called out loudest;
threatened us most.
Patrick Deeley
As you rummage of a morning
among dust-furred personal effects
jumbled in an old
wooden suitcase under a bed . . .
Terry Jones
The Lake District Tourist Board
has had no input into what
you are now reading, but I so
miss Cumbria in Holy Week
Mary Mulholland
Who will pick the apples now she’s gone?
Samantha Carr
She has few secrets with her translucent map skin of blue underground rivers visible to scale.
Alison Patrick
A dozen snail shells exposed on dry soil
in the archangel’s cut brown stalks.
Banded like fairground sweets and helter-skelters . . .
Julie Egdell
At the shore of impossibility
last moments come to nothing
all our plans die in the salt air
of another new day on the black sea.
Elena Chamberlain
My trans friends and I just want to go swimming
in cold water
without a thousand eyes watching.