Today’s choice
Previous poems
Linda McKenna
Smashing Narcissus
We set about him with rifle butts and spades,
waiting our turn alongside our enemies,
the same sunburnt flesh, the same blistered
feet. Met where our camps, the same badly
pitched shelters, the same lack of meat,
converged. Laboured in the stifling heat
at the command of our officers, the same
fools and bullies. Smashed and smashed
at the indecently gleaming white marble,
until the lawn sparkled with a covering
of unseasonable frost. Later, picking splinters
from the same worn-out blankets, knew
if we looked into the shimmering lake
we would see the true picture of ourselves.
Linda McKenna’s second collection, Four Thousand Keys, was published by Doire Press in 2024. The title poem from her debut collection, In the Museum of Misremembered Things, (Doire Pres 2020), won the 2020 An Post Irish Book Awards Poem of the Year. She has had poems published in a wide range of publications and in 2018 won the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing.
Emily A. Taylor
I move my hand long
so yours will follow, and though
this moment tastes of tequila soda
paracetamol pillowed on a fizzing tongue
amnesia… pull me in anyway.
Steph Morris
No way would they let him keep that tag. They saw
a boy they must rename, must mark
from them, a boy whose limbs folded far too gently,
Eryn McDonald
It is here that the day breaks apart
Like ice on frustrated frozen pond
Here in the grounds of Ashton Court
I wish to bury myself amongst the green
Gordan Struić
Outside,
the city slides by,
blurred lines
of glass and rain.
Stephen Keeler
The days were huge and kind
and sometimes after school
we’d buy a bag of broken biscuits
for the long walk home
across the heavy heat of afternoon
on lucky days she wouldn’t take
the pennies offered up in supplication
Joseph Blythe
I swear I felt the swirly patterned paper
rip from the walls of my childhood bedroom.
It was the same stained cream shade as my skin –
pockmarked, cut and scabbed, dry and peeling…..
Denise Bundred
Shadowed boats bereft of sail
absorb the surge and slap
constrained by a blue-grey chink
of mooring chains.
Rahma O. Jimoh
A bird skirts across the fence
& I rush to the window
to behold its flapping wings—
It’s been ages
since I last saw a bird.
Samuel A. Adeyemi
I can already hear the chorus of my tribe.
They want the ancient blade,
the guillotine that hovered
above my head like a halo of death.