Today’s choice
Previous poems
Kath Mckay
How to become two-dimensional
Die. You’re soon reduced to a photograph.
Lugubrious Co-op undertakers will zip you in a bag
and keep you cold, until you’re moved care of Michael,
with curly grey locks like Frodo, who has dropped
too much acid in his youth according to my friend: ‘Look at his eyes,’ she says.
Chill for ten days, be dressed in jacket and jeans,
your daughter’s South Park tie: You will respect my authority.
Burn. Reduced to ash, be thrown into a tree hole in Leeds,
and carried to Pittwater and scattered.
As a photograph, people can kiss your face,
but you can’t kiss back, or put your tongue
down her throat, or curl into her. Nothing left of your arms,
to wrap around her in bed. Only your photo, grinning,
fixed and unchanging. When you were quicksilver, planning
to clear the front garden, take up Spanish, go backpacking in Spain.
Kath Mckay has published three full poetry collections, the most recent, Moving the Elephant, from Michael Laskey’s Garlic Press . She also publishes short stories and longer fiction.
Trelawney
What is holding you back from building your wormery?
You can’t say there isn’t the time. Everyone has the time
when it comes to a wormery. Born with the right tools to hand.
David Van-Cauter
…4am and the birdsong begins, a wet January in a new city and I’m alone watching a man in Minnesota, murdered for protecting a woman from a fascist hit squad. . .
Tim Dwyer
Unexpectedly
My neighbour
opens her window
for fresh salty air
Paul Moclair
Their shore leave over,
. . . the spirits of the dead are bid farewell
until that time next year, when ritual
grants them reprieve again.
Susan Elizabeth Hale
Sometimes words are the only thing
that get you through,
But not the words you think,
not a word like love or hope
those are imprecise.
Seán Street
We lit a candle for you
that day in Sacre Coeur,
under its white-flame dome
as high as Paris could go
Marjory Woodfield
On Kinley’s Lane, quince tree, wild blackberries, branches of feijoa reaching over a fence, fallen fruit.
Ian Seed
What was the Welsh for ‘hedgehog’? That was what he wanted to know.
Sue Wallace-Shaddad
Rectangular, with corners cut off like an octagon, muddy brown shows through the cream exterior where the edges are chipped.