Today’s choice
Previous poems
James Mason
Beginner’s Italian
In Italian I have no inner life.
With no past or future tense
My needs are immediate.
I have hunger. I eat.
I have thirst. I drink.
I have the name for wine not peas.
The heat is good. I want.
Yes, I sleep well, thank you.
But I pass a dreamless night.
I am appetite. A thing of flesh.
More, it says. Again.
I do not know how to say enough.
James Mason lives in Worcestershire, UK. He has an MA in Creative Writing from the Open University.
Sally Jenkins
Funny how Year 8 is doing bones
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There’s something wrong with the sky
it’s the colour of a bruise and smells
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Someone’s shredding the blue
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Something started you to wake,
Leaving sockprints in the parquet
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We ate it leaning against the rail
above the harbour –
black cherry,
melting down the cone
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Among the joys of love was when we got
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Khairina Anindya, Genevieve Beech
‘Khair’
At the feet
of al-Ka‘ba
you asked for a daughter.
‘BIRTHLIGHT’
You are ordinary
to the teenager on the bus,
the doctor at our six-week check.
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We set about him with rifle butts and spades,
waiting our turn alongside our enemies,
the same sunburnt flesh, the same blistered
feet. Met where our camps, the same
Abigail Ottley
She remembers the house of her husband He’s not, as they said he is: loathsome, most monstrous. He has a strange and sinister beauty. His eyes are obsidian, shot through with gold, a ruby burning in each. A noble brow, and magnificent cheekbones. You can...