Today’s choice
Previous poems
Eugene O’Hare
In Memory of Anne
It hasn’t been this bright all year –
the moon’s white scalp, spot-lit,
a head turned away from a thing
the rest of us fear: unearthly dark
and its stars – the small unfindable
glass in a vast unwalkable carpet.
Night is where more things hide
than dare to appear. Except behind
closed eyes, here new worlds realise;
less-ordered, sculpted from twisted
timelines, reared as if out of a sleeping sea;
waves to keep the sleeper from wakeful thought.
So when the priest said she died
at home in her sleep, I replied Too vague
demanding to know during which
dream she was caught. Was she mid-chase –
half-dressed in a colour she’d never wear?
Already talking to the dead?
Or something more of our world, perhaps –
like changing the bed, reversing the car,
washing the step some Summer afternoon,
peeling a label from a beetroot jar –
her cupboards were still full; spices, pins,
seeds for pots. All those flowers.
Eugene O’Hare recently won runner-up for the 52nd Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award and was shortlisted for the poetry prize at Belfast Book Festival. His poems appear, or forthcoming, in The Frogmore Papers, Stand, Poetry Ireland Review, Acumen and others.
Julie Sheridan
They married in a chapel of black steel
bars, tethered up their feathers to serve as
stained glass. . .
Maxine Sibihwana
here, water does not run. instead it
sits obediently in old plastic containers
Lesley Curwen
Her feet snagged in a cleverly-placed net
my sister waits for him to untangle her,
to hold her head still between thick fingers . . .
From the Archives: In Memory of Jean Cardy
Denizens Mice live in the London Tube. A train leaves and small pieces of sooty black detach themselves from the sooty black walls and forage for crumbs in the rubbish under the rails that are death to man. You can’t see their feet move. They...
Tina Cole
Mr. Pig modelling his best Sunday suit of farmyard smells,
flees from the cook’s cleaver to find himself a sow.
Ellora Sutton
My heart is breaking, so I’m setting up my new Wonder Oven.
The waft of toxicity as I run it on empty for ten minutes
is a welcome distraction.
Erin Poppy Koronis
Naked feet rush
over cold pebbles,
phone-torches light
our pathway to the sea.
Bob King
The first wristwatch was first worn
in 1810, despite what old turn-it-up
Flintstones episodes might have you
believe.
Brandon Arnold
Alone, I drive along the midnight, winter road. My left hand at the 12 o’clock position of the steering wheel. And I coast. I let out the day’s long breath, which started out today as a sigh.