Today’s choice

Previous poems

Oenone Thomas

 

 

 

Because I don’t know any other way

I replace my left hand
with a hook, my feet
with jackhammers, both
my eyes with spangled
mirror balls.

I raise my right hand, and
in its palm, I roll another’s
choice of dice. I stud my scalp
with stars, stripe my cheeks
and lips in welts.

I form the phrase how dare you
from hot tacks and nails, I fire it up
into the sky’s great
vacancy. It is no longer
a question.

 

 

Oenone Thomas is a writer, child psychotherapist, and chocolatemaker.  She was Poet in Residence, Cuckmere Pilgrim Path, 2024/25. Her collection from this adventure, Self-Portrait as Scallop Shell, was published last summer.

Rosie Jackson

I Am Trying to Love Frank O’Hara More
I really am! I am trying not to see his exclamation marks as cheap melodrama and his endless conjunctions as some kind of separation anxiety or fear of mortality for what do full stops signify except dying

Tom Blake

We were the housing and the housed,
meaning nothing except that
we were always occupied,
or to put it simply never out.