Today’s choice
Previous poems
Sue Wallace-Shaddad
Tabula Rasa
Rectangular, with corners cut off like an octagon, muddy brown shows through the cream exterior where the edges are chipped. Just the right height for a young child learning to stand. Coloured beakers stacked up ready to be knocked down. A place for card games played at speed, endless cups of tea. Smooth and squat, immovable, it has borne the weight of decades, silent witness to family life, a slab too heavy to lift up.
Sue Wallace-Shaddad’s pamphlets are: Once There Was Colour, (Palewell Press, 2024), Sleeping Under Clouds (Clayhanger Press, 2023), A City Waking Up (Dempsey and Windle, 2020). Widely published, Sue does readings, writes poetry reviews and runs workshops suewallaceshaddad.wordpress.com
William Manning for Mental Health Awareness Week
My room is infested with bedbugs
I’m covered in bites, not love bites
Anna Brook
I want to borrow gods
(as Adrienne does,
though she knew better)
their sad logic
their templates
Nigel King
Turn the mud. Bo Peep’s head tumbles out,
wide-eyed, mouth a little open.
Mohsen Hosseinkhani translated by Tahereh Forsat Safai
Men are the color of soil
Women are sitting on the ashes
Stephen Komarnyckyj
you are the shadow slipping through the mirror
Jo Farrant
We’re stuck on a scene, frozen, like the ice cubes I begged Mum to get with the little flowers in them. Like taking a test in the school gym but your knees are so big they’re banging into the desk.
Douglas K Currier
Afternoon hangs in the air, and the birds leave.
Frogs begin to talk to each other, and the heat congeals.
Stephen Chappell
If you could call that friend,
the special one,
the one you always love and know loves you
Marius Grose
Until the dead, sucked from leaf mould graves
are rising in forest sap, to make connections
inside strange green brains