Today’s choice
Previous poems
Chalice Am Bergris
The Insanity Ensemble
It is not like an egg cracking
or an exquisite shiver of shattered glass.
It is not a supercelery bone snap
or a wired ballerina bend.
A cortisol swoosh
floods your certainty
a prefrontal cortex throb
threatens thunder.
A neurotransmitter harpsichord
plucks delusions
the slide of an unconscious tear
as you slowly lose your mind.
Chalice Am Bergris is physically and mentally disabled. She has been published in Europe, Asia, Africa, America and Australia. She has won the the Over The Edge Poetry Prize in Ireland and is in the Best New British and Irish Poets anthology.
Precious Ejim
I don’t know why I look to my mother
for her shadow never stays.
Jackson
I want to tell my mother,
I made a successful loaf
in the bread machine you didn’t know
you were leaving me
Kath Mckay
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 . . .
Cindy Botha
atlas bear
black-footed ferret
cape lion
Jasmine Gibbs
This morning – Blackstar,
Bowie, those jazz swan songs
sputtering from the CD player,
wild trumpets that convulse
through negative space
Jane Pearn
the pool holds my face
my breath
ripples the water
Robin Lindsay Wilson
The single crimson rose
she wears in her lapel,
to test his imperfections,
draws him into detail
Ian Hickey
When the half-light drops below the horizon
the birth of darkness comes
Rose Lennard
My mother died seven years ago, but last night
she had a message for me. The mechanics
are irrelevant, what she gave stays with me