Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jane Frank
Writing is a Little Door
after Susan Sontag
I imagine returning to the house.
Furniture is piled up in the rain—
the ideas that won’t fit.
Dreams can’t squeeze through every opening,
especially when they’re big,
or floral or velvet with high backs
and mismatched cushions,
bookshelves lined with longing,
soggy volumes—all those re-lived hours.
To write is to lie,
to know imperfect things,
to remember in unfashionable colours
like mimosa and chartreuse.
When I returned to visit
my mother asked me to label
each item with a name—
memories are arrows fired
from room to room.
I imagine the house boarded up,
the abandoned birds
screaming in their nests.
I imagine passionfruit left on the vines
to rot like words.
As I drive away, I look back at the house:
the windows and doors
are smaller than I remember.
Jane Frank is a poet, editor and academic living in Brisbane. Her collection Ghosts Struggle to Swim was published by Calanthe Press in 2023. Her work has been widely published in Australia and internationally. Find her work at facebook.com and www.calanthepress.com
Rizwan Akhtar
In the evening trees become sad
I climbed on them like a metaphor
Alexandra Corrin
Six weeks after diagnosis
I stayed away out of respect for your daughters.
You followed the hearse with your father and the girls.
He couldn’t stay within the boundaries of himself.
John Barron
Thought Experiment
The clock has lost all its numbers.
I wake inside an Einstein thought experiment,
where my bones defy gravity and get sucked
what some call “up.” I’ve only time to grab
from beside the bed where we’re sleeping
our copy of Rovelli’s ‘Reality Is Not What It Seems’
Mick Corrigan
My List Poem of the All-Important
Trish,
Kindness,
A small family of wildflowers announcing themselves in an abandoned pot,
Morning sun warming barley fields at Castletown House Estate,
A grounded fledgling glaring defiance as I gently inquire of her health,
Mike Jenkins
Not a found poem
But a purchased one –
To find Ewrop on a single cup
Despite the English on top –
Re use
duce
cycle
Birziklatu
Genbruge
Endurvinna
Heidi Beck
Self-Portrait as Road Runner You with your elaborate schemes of entrapment, your hunting parties, moonshine and shot-gun weddings, your Sunday-school socials for girls to glue bird seed and pasta on prayer plaques, sew aprons with Singers– this...
Catherine Godlewsky
I have not known how to shape
This poem—
I found it, drowsy,
Quarter-to-six in winter
In the cold of an unfinished floor…
On the Twelfth Day of Christmas, we bring you Elizabeth Gibson and Roma Havers
‘Weighing yourself in the dark at Christmas in your parents’ house’
‘A Rink’
On the Eleventh Day of Christmas, we bring you Alle Bloom and Mariam Saidan
‘Knots’
‘God Makes Me Promises’