Today’s choice

Previous poems

Kath Mckay

by | May 16, 2026 | ,

 

 

 

How to become two-dimensional

Die. You’re soon reduced to a photograph.
Lugubrious Co-op undertakers will zip you in a bag
and keep you cold, until you’re moved care of Michael,
with curly grey locks like Frodo, who has dropped
too much acid in his youth according to my friend: ‘Look at his eyes,’ she says.

Chill for ten days, be dressed in jacket and jeans,
your daughter’s South Park tie: You will respect my authority.
Burn. Reduced to ash, be thrown into a tree hole in Leeds,
and carried to Pittwater and scattered.
As a photograph, people can kiss your face,

but you can’t kiss back, or put your tongue
down her throat, or curl into her.  Nothing left of your arms,
to wrap around her in bed. Only your photo, grinning,
fixed and unchanging. When you were quicksilver, planning
to clear the front garden, take up Spanish, go backpacking in Spain.

 

 

Kath Mckay has published three full poetry collections, the most recent, Moving the Elephant, from Michael Laskey’s Garlic Press . She also publishes short stories and longer fiction.

William Collins

by | Jun 25, 2025 | ,

We carry the shame of Paragraph 352D
folded into suitcases at foreign borders,
where love is questioned like a crime,
and disbelief stamped heavier than visas.
They tell us to run for our lives —
but only if we can do it quietly.

Oz Hardwick

by | Jun 24, 2025 | ,

The ghost of my mother knows the names of everything, but
she can’t tell me, because ghosts, whatever you have heard
to the contrary, can’t speak.

Warren Mortimer

by | Jun 22, 2025 | ,

& 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

by | Jun 21, 2025 | ,

Language reinvents itself,
coruscates in signs on walls;
falls silent, mute as clay and stone
on tablets that enshrine its form.