Today’s choice
Previous poems
Paul Short
Midnight Swingball
Sleep.
Elusive as lucid dreams.
Closed eyes teem wotsit-orange,
spiderweb scarlet &
thatch-brown
body jerks like a
swingball.
Conscience and subconscious
flailing paddles
back forward|forward back
body jerks like a
swing
ball.
Mind simmers with breathless envy
at the
creak-scratch
of
snoutswoons.
forward back | back forward
I try to surrender to exhaustion
body jerks like a
s
w
i
n
g
b
a
l
l.
Paul Short is a Pushcart and BOTN nominated poet from Newcastle upon Tyne. Paul’s work has appeared on BBC Upload, A Thousand Shades of Green Podcast and in Full House Literary, Broken Spine, Black Bough, Dust Poetry and more.
Sally Michaelson
Heads under bonnets
mechanics catch a wiff
of a girl passing
Carmen Marcus
extract from The Keen Is ar scath a Chéile a mhaireann na daoine: It is in the shadow of each other we live. Watching with the dying. Travelling with the dead. Phyllida Anam-Áire; The Celtic Book of Dying, Findhorn Press, Vermont, 2022 Àite...
Nina Parmenter
When The Threat of Hell Failed
God created the lanyard,
Bel Wallace
Month by month I felt my muscles harden
these hefty horns grew from my long skull
Stephen Keeler
Something about arriving somewhere new
just as afternoon is leaving . . .
Geraldine Stoneham
The silence and peace of this place
creeps through on birdsong.
Emma Lee
The instruction invites overthinking:
describe your hometown through
the medium of simple sentences
Vanessa Napolitano
I ask my father to dinner, pretending he is still alive,
ask him what he’d like. He says a pork chop which is not
something I know how to cook.
David Forrest
I don’t know why you bother with poetry Vlad mutters as he adjusts the current in the magnets, forcing them to rhyme with each other.