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.
Jo Farrant
We’re stuck on a scene, frozen, like the ice cubes I begged Mum to get with the little flowers in them. Like taking a test in the school gym but your knees are so big they’re banging into the desk.
Douglas K Currier
Afternoon hangs in the air, and the birds leave.
Frogs begin to talk to each other, and the heat congeals.
Stephen Chappell
If you could call that friend,
the special one,
the one you always love and know loves you
Marius Grose
Until the dead, sucked from leaf mould graves
are rising in forest sap, to make connections
inside strange green brains
Andrew Keyman
a day later you’re in l.a. picking out cars with the magic
only money can buy
Chrissy Banks
So many times I walked
head down half asleep
along that ordinary road to school
Christopher M James
She’d had the two of us, had learnt
how children bury their riddles, how love
unearths them
Opeyemi Oluwayomi
They are piercing knife between
the city, detaching the body from the head,
& squeezing the blood out of the flesh,
so there can be an end to what hasn’t begun.
Rhian Thomas
I sit to fumble some intrusion from my shoe.
A shard of stone, no bigger than a thought, its ridged face
cutting like some old lover, like a baby or
an old preacher drumming something that irks like a worn out song