Today’s choice
Previous poems
Adele Evershed
Some Things My Mother Forgot to Teach Me (Before She Died)
A while ago I saw this prompt on Instagram
though I added ‘before she died’
because mine did—long before
anyway, I made a list
How to think of rejection as a yellow brick
one I could toss
or use to build a road I could dance on
as I made my way to Oz
it’s the sort of thing she might have said
she adored Judy Garland, you see
How to cut my losses
as easily as she once cut my fringe
so I could see without going cock-eyed
How to speak quietly
but with the insistence of valley rain
so I’m never asked—
Oh sweetheart, is it your time of the month?
How to insist on equal pay
my name on the mortgage
an epidural
HRT…
When I found the list the other day
incognito in a mislabeled file
I decided to give it a new title—
Things I Told My Daughter
(just in case I die tomorrow)
I added
How to say no without guilt
How to take up space in a room
How to let a man hold the door
without letting him hold your life
And how to say the things you need to say today
in case you find yourself
somewhere over the rainbow tomorrow
Adele Evershed is a Welsh writer who swapped the Valleys for the American East Coast. A Pushcart Prize–nominated poet and Touchstone Award winner for an individual poem. She has published the poetry collection Turbulence in Small Spaces (Finishing Line Press) and three novellas-in-flash: Wannabe, Schooled (Alien Buddha Press), and A History of Hand Thrown Walls (Unsolicited Press). Her work has appeared in Poetry Wales, Modern Haiku, The Heron’s Nest, Presence, Prune Juice, Comstock Review, Literary Mama, and elsewhere.
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.
Mofiyinfoluwa O.
when you
know that your time with someone has almost run out, that is what you do. you look for
tiny things buried in the sand so that you do not have to look at the huge broken thing
standing between you both.
Chris Emery
and if we walk to the same sea later
we’ll see something heaving up beside us:
caskets of grey, white-capped, barren and loose,
the way memories are.
T. N. Kennedy
so you collect those poems which reveal
life at its most intense and solitary
turning them on when you most need to feel
Mariah Whelan
St Ann’s Square Manchester, 23rd May 2017 Because I cannot show you what is at the centre of all this I will lay language up to its edge, walk its edges the way I moved through the back of the crowd too afraid to go in. I had to shade my eyes from...
Marissa Glover
What Might Have Been There is a small white house high on a green hill just south of Scotland, an office bright with books and a window overlooking Magdalene, and somewhere on a dirt road between endless pastures of strong red fescue, is a man on a...
Cherry Doyle
/ on the days / blood rushes at the corner of a nail / you cannot keep your jumper off the door handle / table tackles leg / expect the bruise in two days’ time / pansies nodding in speckles of rain /
Jennie E. Owen
and in that last moment
the dead shrug, shake
off their boots, shuffle off
jackets and shirts,
Martin Figura for Mental Health Awareness Week
Children in care do not have much of a voice, they often accept whatever is given and do not dare to speak up.