Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jennie E. Owen
Then tragedy makes children of us all
and in that last moment
the dead shrug, shake
off their boots, shuffle off
jackets and shirts, watch astounded
as their dresses grow and drop to their feet.
Their bags, their glasses, car keys and phones
clatter far away
scatter in rings too far too reach.
They are all elbows and scuffed knees
naked but covered
in primary crayon-box colours.
Every one of them fidgets
in their little wooden box
skipping through their mother’s hearts
blowing out the birthday candles of her eyes
over and over.
This soft reduction leaves the rest of us open mouthed
too small to see over the counter, full
of questions that cannot be asked
cannot be answered.
Jennie E. Owen has been widely published online, in literary journals and anthologies. She is Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Forward Prize nominated. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing for The Open University and lives in Lancashire with her husband and three children. Jennie is a PGR at MMU, focusing on traumascapes in the north-west of England.
Rebecca Gethin
Oh walk with me up the slippery lane
when the frost has turned to ice.
Jean Atkin
Wear a coat, you’ll pass through light rain at the wood-edge
under Helmeth. Sing loudly, so the snakes can hear you.
Caleb Parkin
Nature Is Healing
It constructs membranes
between its most powerful organs,
filters pathogens hidden in boats.
Sue Butler
When I read my poem about stretch marks
you said it was a funny thing
to write about. I felt a flare,
low down, an orange hazed ember
you’d have to blow into life.
Susan Darlington
. . . On the edge
of sleep it comes snuffling
through leaf litter and we forget
bed; the cold prickling
our bones.
Dechen Shaw
Monks spend days shaping mandalas
with coloured sand in intricate lines
as an offering, then blow them away.
Andrew Cannon
Wait, I’m talking.
It’s my turn.
Be patient.
It takes me a while.
I have to work it out.
Rhian Parker, Madailín Burnhope and mithago on Trans Day of Visibility
Your focused eyes on a box of plantain.
Deep concentration making them filled
more brown than white.
A different mouth asks if they sell iru.
-Rhian Parker
My cockatiel, Pippin, has learned to listen
for that particular resigned sigh of the bus
as it passes the living room window
and shrieks whenever he hears it.
-Madailín Burnhope
you wanna know if it screams like a man or a girl?
i want to rip a throat out
teeth bared
growling
guttural
it builds in the back of my throat
i scream like an animal
sick of losing siblings
-mithago
Chloe Hanks
the feminine urge to bleed
all over the bedsheets, to refuse
to grow his babies, to abandon your
responsibilities, to forget to buy his toothpaste,
to move everything on his desk an inch to the left,