Today’s choice
Previous poems
Adele Evershed
Some Things My Mother Forgot to Teach Me (Before She Died)
A while ago I saw this prompt on Instagram
though I added ‘before she died’
because mine did—long before
anyway, I made a list
How to think of rejection as a yellow brick
one I could toss
or use to build a road I could dance on
as I made my way to Oz
it’s the sort of thing she might have said
she adored Judy Garland, you see
How to cut my losses
as easily as she once cut my fringe
so I could see without going cock-eyed
How to speak quietly
but with the insistence of valley rain
so I’m never asked—
Oh sweetheart, is it your time of the month?
How to insist on equal pay
my name on the mortgage
an epidural
HRT…
When I found the list the other day
incognito in a mislabeled file
I decided to give it a new title—
Things I Told My Daughter
(just in case I die tomorrow)
I added
How to say no without guilt
How to take up space in a room
How to let a man hold the door
without letting him hold your life
And how to say the things you need to say today
in case you find yourself
somewhere over the rainbow tomorrow
Adele Evershed is a Welsh writer who swapped the Valleys for the American East Coast. A Pushcart Prize–nominated poet and Touchstone Award winner for an individual poem. She has published the poetry collection Turbulence in Small Spaces (Finishing Line Press) and three novellas-in-flash: Wannabe, Schooled (Alien Buddha Press), and A History of Hand Thrown Walls (Unsolicited Press). Her work has appeared in Poetry Wales, Modern Haiku, The Heron’s Nest, Presence, Prune Juice, Comstock Review, Literary Mama, and elsewhere.
Siân Bentham
She doesn’t know what she is doing.
She chops and boils, snacks and sneezes, sits.
Classical radio plays, imbuing
the scene with comic dignity and wit.
J.P. Lancaster
Ivy thrives
despite dependency.
It hangs on, has its other day.
Amy Dugmore
How much water did you have to drink this morning?
Did you sip your coffee without worrying
about its diuretic properties? Was it sunny
where you were?
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