Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jon Wesick
A Fistful of Cake
Loaded with hawks’ cries and horses’ huffs
Ennio Morricone’s score wails
as the camera narrows on cakeslingers’ squints.
Eli Wallach’s, Clint Eastwood’s, and Lee Van Cleef’s
hands tremble near leather holsters.
Eastwood chews the cheroot
clamped in his jaw.
A twitch,
fusillade of thrown pastry,
and chest dripping in strawberry jam
Lee Van Cleef tumbles into an open grave
Hundreds of Jon Wesick’s poems and stories have appeared in journals such as the I-70 Review, New Verse News, Paterson Literary Review, and Unlikely Stories. He is a regional editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual and host of the Gelato East Fiction Open Mic as well as the NAV Arts poetry reading. His latest short story collection is Saint John the Blasphemer. He lives in Manchester, New Hampshire and longs for gene editing to bring giant wombats back from extinction. http://jonwesick.com
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.
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 . . .