Today’s choice
Previous poems
Robin Lindsay Wilson
Miss Betina Wauchope Disappears
From the 1927 painting ‘Interior: Orange Blind’ by FCB Cadell.
The single crimson rose
she wears in her lapel,
to test his imperfections,
draws him into detail;
pointing a thinner brush
at her wintery cheeks,
the bones of her hands.
A face ready for regard,
emptied with white spirit,
cancelled with a rag wipe,
begun again with doubt.
Behind her, the orange blind,
fuses matter and antimatter.
It guillotines space and time,
until there’s no judgment.
She pretends to love art,
as the rose petals soften.
She tries to love herself,
while he paints her portrait
as orange stupefaction.
She feels anonymous,
not responsible for sunset,
or the malice of the furniture.
Her immortality is powerless –
his contempt is complete.
Robin Lindsay Wilson is a prizewinning playwright and poet. He has three collections of poetry published by Cinnamon Press. His forth collection, The Tender Shore, is scheduled to be published in Spring of 2027 by Cinnamon Press. Robin’s work has appeared in many national and international poetry magazines, including, Acumen, The Amsterdam Review, Magma, The Rialto, Ink, Sweat & Tears, New Writing Scotland, Dream Catcher and Poetry Salzburg.
Christopher M James
She’d had the two of us, had learnt
how children bury their riddles, how love
unearths them
Opeyemi Oluwayomi
They are piercing knife between
the city, detaching the body from the head,
& squeezing the blood out of the flesh,
so there can be an end to what hasn’t begun.
Rhian Thomas
I sit to fumble some intrusion from my shoe.
A shard of stone, no bigger than a thought, its ridged face
cutting like some old lover, like a baby or
an old preacher drumming something that irks like a worn out song
Erwin Arroyo Pérez
Here, in my Manhattan room / insomnia tugs at me like a half-closed taxi door / letting all the echoes in
/ an ambulance carries the last breath of an asthmatic man
Hannah Linden
Formed into darkness
an octopus squeezes around
the spaces of a shipwreck.
Kweku Abimbola
My father walks backwards
better than most walk forward—
so whenever he sewed his steps into the living
room carpet, I rushed to mirror my moon-
walking, until he froze,
froze like he’d been caught
by the beat.
Paul Bavister
We found our eyes first,
as they swirled through fragments
of black jumper, dark pine trees
and an orange sunset sky
Anne Donnellan
I prayed for resurrection
that the sun in the sky
might dance Easter morning.
Philip Gross
Enough of scorch, scald, sore- and rawness.
Sometimes flesh longs for eclipse.