Today’s choice

Previous poems

Farah Ali

 

 

 

Notes from nature on how to survive this:

1. Learn crypsis and mimesis be a gecko or a mossy frog

2. Method actors sway like dead-leaf mantises on branches

3. Spikes are effective, mollusc shells cumbersome

4. Warning! sea urchins maim and poison in any depth zone

5. Wear red, hiss, spray, rattle in worst-case scenarios

6. Injured starfish grow another limb, they don’t miss the old one,
barely remember it, apparently

7. Hide, freeze, or gallop away from prairie rain and savannah shadows

8. *Important* octopuses can be harmed by their own ink cloud

 

 

 

Farah Ali has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and shortlisted for the Touchstone Awards. She has been published in Anti-Heroin Chic, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Rattle, Right Hand Pointing, tiny wren lit, Tokyo Poetry Journal and many others.

Irene Cunningham

Lavender seeps. I expect my limbs to leaden, lead the body down through sheet, mattress-cover, into the machinery of sleep where other lives exist.

Graham Clifford

The Still Face Experiment 

You must have seen that Youtube clip 

where a mother lets her face go dead. 

Her toddler carries on burbling for twenty to thirty seconds until she realises there is nothing coming back to her.