Today’s choice
Previous poems
Salvatore Difalco
Eek, Eyck
No green swell this evening
will detach me from my hat.
No hand held out gingerly
will bend my frozen elbow.
Next door, the goldfinch
on the box turns and chirps.
Hounds outside hunt fox
or men who play God.
My face is not as pale
as yours and yet so pale.
Tell me, is your green
dress of cotton or of wool?
If wool you must beware
of wolves mistaking you.
The little dog on the floor
looks like furry slippers.
Fruit on the window sill
looks ripe enough to eat.
Yet your rosary hangs from
a rusty nail like a noose.
No swell is mine to claim.
My name will not be signed.
Withdraw your pallid hand.
The hounds are at the door.
Salvatore Difalco is a Sicilian Canadian poet and short story writer currently living in Toronto, Canada. His poems and stories have appeared in many journals.
Anne Symons
She was only a little woman
five feet nothing in nylon stockings.
‘If I stood sideways they’d mark me absent.’
Ben
When she said ‘could’, it was clearly in italics
and when she said ‘one day’, the creak of glaciers
shuddered around its edges.
Dragana Lazici
the days are long but the years are short.
seconds are tiny kitchen knives in my back.
i stopped reading Dickinson, her voice is a sad parrot.
Abigail Ottley
Faces, unless they come swimming up close. are a blur of piggy-pink and ice-
cream. In the street, she doesn’t know, cannot be certain when to smile, when to
look away
Maggie Mackay
The teacher is an old spindly man. Grim, out of a Grimm’s tale. Scarecrow hair, thinning. Unsmiling.
Natasha Gauthier
The tawny clutch appeared
on high-heeled evenings only,
slept in a nest of white tissue.
Romy Morreo
She only speaks to me these days
through groaning floorboards in the night
and slammed doors.
Emma Simon
No-one has seen a ghost while breast-feeding
despite the unearthly hours, the half-light
mad sing-song routines of rocking a child
back to sleep.
Kushal Poddar
The furniture covered in once
transparent now foggy sheets
craft the room a morgue, and we
identity the bodies