Today’s choice
Previous poems
Siobhan Logan
Misdiagnosis
There’s something wrong with my head
it’s too tight, it’s a round black shape
on the pavement where the grand piano fell
six storeys and flattened my skull
There’s something wrong with the sky
it’s the colour of a bruise and smells
of burnt toast. Do you hear that noise?
Someone’s shredding the blue
There’s something wrong with my mouth
everything tastes of brine
or rubbery seaweed and when I swallow
pebbles catch in my throat
There’s something wrong with the clock
that stuck on the 16th of April,
five forty-five, when the telephone rang
and the cuckoo choked
There’s something wrong with my legs
because they want to sit down
all the time but when they do
they want to run away
There’s something wrong with the game
of doctors and nurses. Sitting in a circle
to pass the parcel. The muzak cuts
as they give me – BOOM!
There’s something wrong with my heart
so the surgeon opens me up. They snip
my hairspring and mislay the ticks:
close with a dropped stitch.
There’s something wrong with the message
the punctuation stutters and the name
is smudged. Her name must be wrong.
Wouldn’t that explain everything?
Siobhan Logan has published two books of poetry & non-fiction with Original Plus Press and two with Space Cat Press. She has also lectured in Creative Writing at De Montfort University, UK. spacecatpress.co.uk
Hannah Linden
I was cutlery left out in the rain, rusty
by morning, a side-slipping fiddlestick
desperate for music, starved for company.
Eve Chancellor
Imagine waking up one day and discovering
that you are a horse. At first, you might not
believe it and think you are dreaming.
Ananya S Guha
The leaves are growing out of
a harangue of loneliness
palms cupped I listen to silences
of winter or summers
Peter Leight
Instead of Dying I’m Taking a Trip
to Kansas
where the light appears
as if walking through a gate
in the air
Daniel Cartwright-Chaouki
Its timber frame held together by the waste
of its own decay
The rot a kind of glue undisturbed
Cracked panes of glass hold their fractures
Rosie Jackson
I Am Trying to Love Frank O’Hara More
I really am! I am trying not to see his exclamation marks as cheap melodrama and his endless conjunctions as some kind of separation anxiety or fear of mortality for what do full stops signify except dying
Charlotte Holm, Jennifer A McGowan
A leaky drainpipe drips
creating damp patches on uneven paving,
slime green algae blossoms
forming viridescent ripples
James McDermott
if samsara’s concrete please don’t come back
as black jackal for I live in Norwich
nor spineless worm as I don’t have a lawn
Cheryl Snell, Alice Gregorio, Peter Lilly
I grew up on a farm so I should know all about expensive cows and free milk. You’re taking being a debutante much too literally. We only meant to give permission for you to make a good match, not flit among the suitable boys…