Today’s choice
Previous poems
Betty Doyle
At Sea
Both cast out to sea, I wonder –
did your ashes ever meet?
It was under the same sun setting,
although years and miles apart.
My grandmother, loosened slowly
into Cardigan Bay under a Hay Moon.
My best friend, spread across a bed
of Pacific seamount, five years before.
Down there, the rocks are hot.
They fracture. Plates upend and falter.
It is a far-off land, alien to our Irish Sea,
with no way for their salt to meet, but still
I imagine their greetings –
a grain from my grandmother’s jaw
grazing dust that used to be my best friend’s knee,
their cinders caught by current,
tumbling together. The loam debris
of a femur, loess of skull dome cupping
one another. What do they talk about?
I hope it’s me. In darkened rooms,
in the land of the living, I click through
learning the names of bones
that have been calcified, atomized, sown.
My inherited orbital bone, the lunate
I used to hold; the incus that only hears
the rush of opposite tides, mandibles open
to taste the salt, the spray, the tears.
Antony Owen
Twenty- something sex are bodies.
thrown down like sophomore prose.
Martin Mooney
The footbridge was skinned in graffiti – slogans, threats,
declarations of love, swastikas. Grek. Kost. Lapse.
Aardhra Chandran
Canvas boots, pig-iron tacks.
At midnight, the wooden platform groans like a hull.
Jason Lovell
While children kneel at your cage in awe
edge offerings of cashew nuts, chopped fruit,
curse words into your magnificent beak,
mums settle carrier bags at tired wet feet
Elijah MacBean
My Name is My Name Ami never let anyone call my sister Sam – it always had to be Samina. She said she’d rather be waterboarded than let her daughter be whitewashed by whites too conservative to spare the extra syllables. Ami never let anyone call...
Damen O’Brien
The coastline’s smile is sharp with blackened teeth,
seabird shelters, scarps, cutaways, broken reefs:
the bloody mouth of a boxer who can’t be dropped,
punch drunk with the brain’s purple pounding . . .
Gwil James Thomas
Terrestrial locomotion
across concrete,
the inverted pendulum,
moving flesh and boot –
Royal Rhodes
The passenger train along the Connecticut shoreline moves as if in a
river of wooden ties and steel rails. . .
Neil Elder
There are blackbirds singing beautifully at dawn,
Mozart and Shakespeare existed and that’s fine . . .