Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jane Ayres
Deathbed Fantasia
as now melts & nowhere goes nowhere
we wash up breathless
a box of blue light star-cushioned
harvesting morphine-thick razorlick-blueberry-pinch
& my sub-tropical heart
will punctuate the idea of treacling hope
puncturing the sense of a book
Opacity.
(it is not enough it is not enough)
find the version of yourself with sharpened corners
urge it forwards
& now the blue makes sense. kind of.
Jane Ayres was shortlisted for the 2021 Aesthetica Creative Writing Award. Her first collection edible was published by Beir Bua Press (July 2022) and micro-chapbook my lost womb still sings to me published by Porkbelly Press (October 2023)
John Doyle
I hide a knife amongst a bush longing to burn,
days like these are plots from a heathen’s bible.
William Coniston
My second cousin twice removed arrived in May
at her old nest in the eaves of the ruined barn.
Simon Williams
A white cloak that folds like a shopping bag,
like a Pac-a-mac with pagan overtones,
much larger when unfolded than a pocket,
a TARDIS of a cloak.
Emma Page
I grow shoots, acid green;
climb the walls,
surprise myself.
Mary McQueen
It’s starts in utero, painted wood carvings thick as a
finger, gift
wrapped in nostalgia.
Alan Hardy
Made a list.
A record.
The dishes she ate.
Monuments visited.
In Paris.
Susana Arrieta
Tempting death with every cobblestoned step
his face was a collection of broken records
Peter Leight
There’s more waste than we use for the things we ordinarily use waste for, such as piling it on barges and sending them out to sea, tucking it under the surface like a layer of insulation . . .
John Grey
there are some lives
lived poolside
and others that
mostly consist of
a bent back in a field –