Today’s choice
Previous poems
Martin Mooney
Lapse
Graffiti artists, known as writers, are often misunderstood by society.
Eden Magazine
The footbridge was skinned in graffiti – slogans, threats,
declarations of love, swastikas. Grek. Kost. Lapse.
I’d assumed lapse was a tag, a nom de plume or guerre, but
as the morning drags itself towards noon the word
has surfaced and resurfaced: lapse, lapse, lapse. Noun
or verb? Am I instructed? Warned? By lunchtime
I wonder if it’s even word at all, perhaps the writer
just sprayed shapes that look like L A P S E by fluke.
And by mid-afternoon it’s drained of sense, a dazed
semantic husk, so that as I cross the bridge again
I whisper it to myself as virgin sound, unsaid till now:
brute air lip-shaped, a world in a kind of freefall.
Martin Mooney is the author of four collections – Grub (1993), Rasputin and his Children (2000), Blue Lamp Disco (2003) and The Resurrection of the Body at Killysuggen (2011). A New and Selected is due from Greenwich Exchange later in 2026
Janet Hatherley
He’s ten years older than he’d said, which makes him
twenty-eight years older, not eighteen.
Syed Anas S
We are the ones
who see big crackers
burst every day—
Dharmavadana
She barely glances at you when you chink
your spare coins in her upturned cap, but still
spreads a spell among the pavement footfalls,
Tim Dwyer
Shedding Annamakerrig It begins high up the chestnut tree with leaves on the twigs on the tips of branches where sap has slowed. Turning amber carried by the breeze they touch the earth, rest on the grass where autumn begins Tim...
Gopal Lahiri
From this far-side apartment
you watch jarul leaves darkening with the seasons
Adam Kelly
Determined, you smash against the window
I have to admire you in your striped suit
Sandra Noel
The sea happens to me today
not because I’m the woman in the bakers
brusque turned rude
or the peaches still hard in the bowl
Grace Lynn
Sunlight saunters in long, thin wires through the fallow field
of my bedroom. You approach, a migrating heron
in a runny yolk collar and suntanned shorts, a white-light emissary
of hope. . .
Miriam Swales
I’m waiting for news I don’t want to talk about
and scrolling through old photos to escape.
After some swipes, I see you walking away.