Today’s choice
Previous poems
Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig
Grief shows me just another sunset
Dusk is dancing & all the visual technologies at hand feel
overwhelmed: mobile eye, pit pastels, graphic card.
It’s down to language, then, imagine.
Above parade pearlescent clouds
looking more permanent than us.
Behind you, incandescent gloaming
rips through time, retina, skin.
This clarity, it blinds the soul, its old familiar.
Listen
how it sings
setting every edge on fire.
Watch
how it streams,
extends, pinks up.
Maybe now you share my sense
of consolation:
that those who went before us,
& who loved us,
those whom we love,
still,
lived
to see this light.
Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig is a translator, editor, and author. Her poetry publications include the pamphlet kinscapes and the anthology The Joy of Living (both with Dreich). Her work has appeared in various publications, including Poetry Scotland, Dust Poetry, and Neologism.
Robert Billinski
the sky met the water where the birds met the fish
the sky met the water where the fish met the birds
the sky met the birds where the water met the fish
Gordon Vells
Impotent in family life and ineffectual at work,
sometimes he would spend a full quarter-hour
just circulating the mini-roundabout on his moped,
dizzy from the power of blocking everyone else.
Patrick Wright
i protest say how when i’m gone i’d like to rest before the choice to return & go through
all this again you sigh as though that’s absurd & endings are just endings we’re mulch
& nothing but endless fucking
L. Haiman
My baby is hungry. Grabs
me with both hands. I am
an apple, apparently no will.
Francis de Lima
Oh London. U useless city. Map to
nowhere land. Tight stretch
open eye. The underground metal.
The night tube. The railway. Smog
Over coaltrip. The presence
Of machine upon machine. U
Miriam Swales
When I was 12, I knew the weight of a human head.
8 Heads in a Duffel Bag (a bit of dark comedy).
It grew from there. The curiosity. The calculations.
Alison Pritchard
By what rough science
were you given
this migraine of a name
Matt Gilbert
Disgust springs up from the guts
to meet a sprinting lump
of furry muscle.
Kathleen Bryson
I am the dreaming herpetogaster chimera and
I am part-and-parcel of the impossible animals project.