Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jane Frank
Wake
The leaves are a colour you’ve never seen
but that I will learn to expect
and there’s a fracas-induced full moon,
clouds beneath like soot
from giant candles.
I woke up and the time ahead was missing
like Notre Dame’s gothic power
and the spots gone from a baby giraffe
born in a zoo in Tennessee.
Today I walked into a gelato-coloured
building and talked about search
engine optimisation, unfamiliar syntax
and the fact that Marcel Proust
wrote a 601-word-long run-on
sentence in In Search of Lost Time
and now I am squeezing the moon like
a stress ball in my fingers as stars fly.
There’s a person-shaped hole
in the centre of me where you ran through,
strings of words like a wake behind you.
Jane Frank is a prize-winning Australian poet, editor and academic. Her most recent collection is Gardening on Mars (Shearsman Books, 2025) and two earlier collections were published by Calanthe Press. Read more of her work at https://www.facebook.com/JaneFrankPoet/
Ken Evans
You try doing star-jumps, steps,
or squats, in knee-high wellies.
Joe Williams
I was born in a town of shadows.
Anne Symons
She was only a little woman
five feet nothing in nylon stockings.
‘If I stood sideways they’d mark me absent.’
Ben
When she said ‘could’, it was clearly in italics
and when she said ‘one day’, the creak of glaciers
shuddered around its edges.
Dragana Lazici
the days are long but the years are short.
seconds are tiny kitchen knives in my back.
i stopped reading Dickinson, her voice is a sad parrot.
Abigail Ottley
Faces, unless they come swimming up close. are a blur of piggy-pink and ice-
cream. In the street, she doesn’t know, cannot be certain when to smile, when to
look away
Maggie Mackay
The teacher is an old spindly man. Grim, out of a Grimm’s tale. Scarecrow hair, thinning. Unsmiling.
Natasha Gauthier
The tawny clutch appeared
on high-heeled evenings only,
slept in a nest of white tissue.
Romy Morreo
She only speaks to me these days
through groaning floorboards in the night
and slammed doors.