Today’s choice
Previous poems
Laura Sheahen
Outsider
What is the ancient curse they know that you don’t
Moving along their mouth-lines and their eyebrows
Lowering their lids, tensing their nods or shrugs
No spell has locked their lips but they are silent
Watching you try, watching you fall again
(Jeweled box with hind-heart bloody in its depths
Mirror that will not show a child its face
Quiet are mice and insects in the castle)
The shoulders shrug the eyes refuse beseeching
And every throat grows closed Hushed with the secret
Watching you stagger
Watching you try again
Laura Sheahen is an American poet who spends part of her time in Tunisia. Her poems have been published in PN Review, The Manhattan Review, The Lincoln Review, and other journals. She writes criticism for The New Criterion, ArtsFuse, The Irish Times, and other publications. lsheahen.substack.com
Trelawney
What is holding you back from building your wormery?
You can’t say there isn’t the time. Everyone has the time
when it comes to a wormery. Born with the right tools to hand.
David Van-Cauter
…4am and the birdsong begins, a wet January in a new city and I’m alone watching a man in Minnesota, murdered for protecting a woman from a fascist hit squad. . .
Tim Dwyer
Unexpectedly
My neighbour
opens her window
for fresh salty air
Paul Moclair
Their shore leave over,
. . . the spirits of the dead are bid farewell
until that time next year, when ritual
grants them reprieve again.
Susan Elizabeth Hale
Sometimes words are the only thing
that get you through,
But not the words you think,
not a word like love or hope
those are imprecise.
Seán Street
We lit a candle for you
that day in Sacre Coeur,
under its white-flame dome
as high as Paris could go
Marjory Woodfield
On Kinley’s Lane, quince tree, wild blackberries, branches of feijoa reaching over a fence, fallen fruit.
Ian Seed
What was the Welsh for ‘hedgehog’? That was what he wanted to know.
Sue Wallace-Shaddad
Rectangular, with corners cut off like an octagon, muddy brown shows through the cream exterior where the edges are chipped.