Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jeff Skinner
Hamlet in the Scanner
Can’t hear yourself think only the bass line
of a heart thumping. Your head’s clamped.
You can’t move. A panic button slicks
a palm, a soft wet plum. You could be
bounded in a nutshell and count yourself a king
of infinite space if not for this death metal
soundtrack banging in your ears.
Is the rest silence? Wriggling fingers,
toes, fingers, you fidget and flex, as you will –
for anything to do. Otherwise you’re
paralysed with angst. If Ophelia should come
she would not see you as you see yourself –
someone whose life is being examined
whose breath’s short, who swallows his spit.
Did your gaolers slip off for a smoke –
leave you in your ship going nowhere?
Outside, a summer’s day you can’t get to:
more undreamt things, other voices.
Jeff Skinner‘s poems are widely published, most recently in Atrium, Underbelly Press, Black Nore Review, The Aftershock Review. His pamphlet, Us, was shortlisted for the Live Canon pamphlet prize. In July 2023 he was diagnosed with a neuro-degenerative condition.
Rachael Clyne
And if a land loses its people and they
are exiled will a land feel their absence
Tom Nutting
They have been burying us,
not realising
we were seeds
of revolution.
Emily A. Taylor
I move my hand long
so yours will follow, and though
this moment tastes of tequila soda
paracetamol pillowed on a fizzing tongue
amnesia… pull me in anyway.
Steph Morris
No way would they let him keep that tag. They saw
a boy they must rename, must mark
from them, a boy whose limbs folded far too gently,
Eryn McDonald
It is here that the day breaks apart
Like ice on frustrated frozen pond
Here in the grounds of Ashton Court
I wish to bury myself amongst the green
Gordan Struić
Outside,
the city slides by,
blurred lines
of glass and rain.
Stephen Keeler
The days were huge and kind
and sometimes after school
we’d buy a bag of broken biscuits
for the long walk home
across the heavy heat of afternoon
on lucky days she wouldn’t take
the pennies offered up in supplication
Joseph Blythe
I swear I felt the swirly patterned paper
rip from the walls of my childhood bedroom.
It was the same stained cream shade as my skin –
pockmarked, cut and scabbed, dry and peeling…..
Denise Bundred
Shadowed boats bereft of sail
absorb the surge and slap
constrained by a blue-grey chink
of mooring chains.