Today’s choice
Previous poems
Soledad Santana
Kamila
Seen as she’d hung her cranial lantern
from the roof of her step-father’s garden shed,
the parabolic formula was skipped; like two calves, we followed the fence
to the end of the foot-ball pitch.
Beneath their sprinklers, we kissed on our knees
until their 4 eyeless faces had shrivelled around a few blades
of grass. Soundless time-lapses of short, irrelevant lives.
Every few seconds, he’d sink his canines into the meat
of my bottom lip, sneak his cold hand beneath my skirt,
repeat that oh he’d forgotten. Eventually, I got up,
shook off the dirt. I said nothing when he asked why
my mum never lets him come over.
By pick-up, the middle school secretary had alerted her mailing list
about Kamila’s untimely death. The email gave no further details
but ended ‘with warmth,’ and encouraged the parents to speak
to their children, ask us how we really were.
I was still damp.
Midway home, Ma pulled the car over on the side of the road,
turned, abruptly, to look at me.
I thought she might be smelling
him, oozing through my neck like a city grate,
getting ready to bust my mouth open.
Instead, she told me a parent only ever wants
to see their child happy.
I nodded, and we drove home, pretending,
I had a super-power other 14 year olds
didn’t.
Soledad Santana is a poet
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.
Neil Fulwood
Today’s operative on the ohrwurm shift
has hacked the WiFi password
in the ear canal and now I’m looping back
endlessly to a misheard lyric . . .
Ira Lightman
Laid down, his upraised face is
White – offputting – on a plumped pillow.
Dave Wynne-Jones
“The all-consuming passion
is rarely found
more than a recipe
for misery,”
you read
Pat Edwards
He appears like a paper bag blown onto the feeder,
punching his beak time and again into the peanuts.
Kate Noakes
If you follow faerie lights
that wisp where boardwalk
becomes trackway, make sure
you’re stocked with milk,
or bread and salt.
Gopal Lahiri
My father stitched an evening with current ripples
spill over rocks and shadows gather at the corner,
Paul Loney
i was standing
very still
my mind