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.
Lesley Curwen
Her feet snagged in a cleverly-placed net
my sister waits for him to untangle her,
to hold her head still between thick fingers . . .
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Denizens Mice live in the London Tube. A train leaves and small pieces of sooty black detach themselves from the sooty black walls and forage for crumbs in the rubbish under the rails that are death to man. You can’t see their feet move. They...
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Mr. Pig modelling his best Sunday suit of farmyard smells,
flees from the cook’s cleaver to find himself a sow.
Ellora Sutton
My heart is breaking, so I’m setting up my new Wonder Oven.
The waft of toxicity as I run it on empty for ten minutes
is a welcome distraction.
Erin Poppy Koronis
Naked feet rush
over cold pebbles,
phone-torches light
our pathway to the sea.
Bob King
The first wristwatch was first worn
in 1810, despite what old turn-it-up
Flintstones episodes might have you
believe.
Brandon Arnold
Alone, I drive along the midnight, winter road. My left hand at the 12 o’clock position of the steering wheel. And I coast. I let out the day’s long breath, which started out today as a sigh.
Steph Ellen Feeney
My mother is here, and might not have been,
so I hold things tighter:
the small-getting-smaller of her
running with my daughter down the beach . . .
Anna Fernandes
My stubby maroon glove spent a chill night
on the velvet ridge of Clent Hills
tangled in summer-dried grasses