Today’s choice
Previous poems
Kath Mckay
How to become two-dimensional
Die. You’re soon reduced to a photograph.
Lugubrious Co-op undertakers will zip you in a bag
and keep you cold, until you’re moved care of Michael,
with curly grey locks like Frodo, who has dropped
too much acid in his youth according to my friend: ‘Look at his eyes,’ she says.
Chill for ten days, be dressed in jacket and jeans,
your daughter’s South Park tie: You will respect my authority.
Burn. Reduced to ash, be thrown into a tree hole in Leeds,
and carried to Pittwater and scattered.
As a photograph, people can kiss your face,
but you can’t kiss back, or put your tongue
down her throat, or curl into her. Nothing left of your arms,
to wrap around her in bed. Only your photo, grinning,
fixed and unchanging. When you were quicksilver, planning
to clear the front garden, take up Spanish, go backpacking in Spain.
Kath Mckay has published three full poetry collections, the most recent, Moving the Elephant, from Michael Laskey’s Garlic Press . She also publishes short stories and longer fiction.
Stephen Chappell
If you could call that friend,
the special one,
the one you always love and know loves you
Marius Grose
Until the dead, sucked from leaf mould graves
are rising in forest sap, to make connections
inside strange green brains
Andrew Keyman
a day later you’re in l.a. picking out cars with the magic
only money can buy
Chrissy Banks
So many times I walked
head down half asleep
along that ordinary road to school
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.