Today’s choice
Previous poems
Alicia Byrne Keane
Bureaucracies of Water
I’ve been reading about ghost apples.
They are a real phenomenon, like how
everyone we can see on the wide street
outside this building is still living,
managing thus far, attending appointments,
the fissures in their teeth holding sugar
or leaf-fibre. A ghost apple
is something the name of which I keep
forgetting so I call them glass apples instead,
which is more what they look like.
During a cold snap, fruit breaks
under its own skin; rain settles solid
as information. It takes more for an apple
to freeze, compared to water.
Lower temperature, an increase of nights.
So the flesh falls away & the ice remains,
pitted as an Autumn made of breath
or so it seems, the stalk and branch
leading to cloud-crater, iridescent air.
When we went to the sandspit island
to see our city mirrored, lights wavering
by the bulk of the docks, we each spoke
only briefly from the wind-whip of our bikes
of the lake that was forming there
among dun reeds, tenuous dunes.
This place floodplain & changing shape
from the beginning. A puddle joins another
to become rippled azure, the land
a surprised letter with absence in its middle:
p peninsula, b breakers, d disappearance.
Dr. Alicia Byrne Keane‘s poetry has been published in The Stinging Fly, Oxford Poetry and Poetry Ireland Review, among other journals. Alicia’s second collection is forthcoming from Broken Sleep Books in autumn 2026.
Stephen Keeler
The days were huge and kind
and sometimes after school
we’d buy a bag of broken biscuits
for the long walk home
across the heavy heat of afternoon
on lucky days she wouldn’t take
the pennies offered up in supplication
Joseph Blythe
I swear I felt the swirly patterned paper
rip from the walls of my childhood bedroom.
It was the same stained cream shade as my skin –
pockmarked, cut and scabbed, dry and peeling…..
Denise Bundred
Shadowed boats bereft of sail
absorb the surge and slap
constrained by a blue-grey chink
of mooring chains.
Rahma O. Jimoh
A bird skirts across the fence
& I rush to the window
to behold its flapping wings—
It’s been ages
since I last saw a bird.
Samuel A. Adeyemi
I can already hear the chorus of my tribe.
They want the ancient blade,
the guillotine that hovered
above my head like a halo of death.
Mofiyinfoluwa O.
when you
know that your time with someone has almost run out, that is what you do. you look for
tiny things buried in the sand so that you do not have to look at the huge broken thing
standing between you both.
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...