Today’s choice
Previous poems
Salvatore Difalco
Eek, Eyck
No green swell this evening
will detach me from my hat.
No hand held out gingerly
will bend my frozen elbow.
Next door, the goldfinch
on the box turns and chirps.
Hounds outside hunt fox
or men who play God.
My face is not as pale
as yours and yet so pale.
Tell me, is your green
dress of cotton or of wool?
If wool you must beware
of wolves mistaking you.
The little dog on the floor
looks like furry slippers.
Fruit on the window sill
looks ripe enough to eat.
Yet your rosary hangs from
a rusty nail like a noose.
No swell is mine to claim.
My name will not be signed.
Withdraw your pallid hand.
The hounds are at the door.
Salvatore Difalco is a Sicilian Canadian poet and short story writer currently living in Toronto, Canada. His poems and stories have appeared in many journals.
Clare Bryden
how do I begin?
Yvonne Baker
an etherial whiteness
that covers and disguises
as a strip of white frosted glass
Hilary Thompson
Ambling up North Street
on a Saturday afternoon
at the end of a long Winter,
I am stopped by two women
Irene Cunningham
Lavender seeps. I expect my limbs to leaden, lead the body down through sheet, mattress-cover, into the machinery of sleep where other lives exist.
Graham Clifford
The Still Face Experiment
You must have seen that Youtube clip
where a mother lets her face go dead.
Her toddler carries on burbling for twenty to thirty seconds until she realises there is nothing coming back to her.
Susan Jane Sims
After you died,
someone asked:
What was it like
in those final sixteen days
waiting for your son to die?
Jane Frank
I imagine returning to the house.
Furniture is piled up in the rain—
the ideas that won’t fit.
Ilias Tsagas
I used to dial your number to hear your voice. I would hold the receiver for a long time as if your voice was trapped inside . . .
Jim Paterson
Shove it, that farewell
and the sky shimmering with frost
and the waves wrecking on the shore