Today’s choice
Previous poems
Farah Ali
Notes from nature on how to survive this:
1. Learn crypsis and mimesis be a gecko or a mossy frog
2. Method actors sway like dead-leaf mantises on branches
3. Spikes are effective, mollusc shells cumbersome
4. Warning! sea urchins maim and poison in any depth zone
5. Wear red, hiss, spray, rattle in worst-case scenarios
6. Injured starfish grow another limb, they don’t miss the old one,
barely remember it, apparently
7. Hide, freeze, or gallop away from prairie rain and savannah shadows
8. *Important* octopuses can be harmed by their own ink cloud
Farah Ali has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and shortlisted for the Touchstone Awards. She has been published in Anti-Heroin Chic, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Rattle, Right Hand Pointing, tiny wren lit, Tokyo Poetry Journal and many others.
Warren Mortimer
& you’ll understand if i leave open this theatre of air
not as the invite for another loss
but to honour their world unwilling to collapse
Jena Woodhouse
Language reinvents itself,
coruscates in signs on walls;
falls silent, mute as clay and stone
on tablets that enshrine its form.
Martin Rieser
The river is an old demon
& my heart is an infirm creature
The river is sure of its way
& my heart is capable of lies.
Sreeja Naskar
glass-tooth morning.
salt mouth.
i left the stove on just to feel wanted.
Gordan Struić
Still —
I kept
writing.
Sometimes
just:
“Hi.”
Margaret Poynor-Clark
Inside my bedroom I take a fresh blade
pull off my jumper, examine the ladder
in front of the mirror cut through my laces
rung by rung
Jenny Hockey
That’s when she went to ground,
after she disobeyed, painted her plastic tea set
red, hidden away in the playhouse they built
down where bindweed draped
Sue Proffitt
You and I have had many talks since you died.
Nick Cooke
If when you go to the barber today
He asks if you’d like him to ‘tidy up your ears’,
Think of all the wildest sprawling vegetation
That will never be tidied, or trimmed, by clippers or shears,