Today’s choice

Previous poems

Colin Dardis

 

 

 

Mausoleum
A house is a machine for living in.- Le Corbusier

I have never climbed a tree,
never broken a bone
and will never walk on water.
I open my little window
and worry about possibilities:
imprudent intruders
of bird or cat, the wind, the cold.
The sky often tells me
when it’s time to close up again.
Some days, the house
is where you do your dying.
The true living waits outside.

 

 

Colin Dardis is a writer and editor from Northern Ireland. He edits the Poem Alone blog, and is co-host of Purely Poetry, an open mic night in Belfast. His recent collections are My Life Is A Film I Haven’t Yet Watched (Buttonhook Press, 2025), and with the lakes (above/ground press, 2024). www.colindardispoet.co.uk

Martin Fisher

Inside, in the half-light, the iron rot took hold.
Forgotten service–obsolete.
Salt-coin neglect.

The money flowed inland,
Moored on an hourglass choke.
No one told the sea.

Amirah Al Wassif

Beneath my armpit lives a Sinbad the size of a thumb.
His imagination feeds through an umbilical cord tied to my womb.
Now and then, people hear him speaking through a giant microphone—
Singing,
Cracking jokes,

Mark Smith

In the portacabin that morning, men smoked
and looked at last week’s paper again.
There was no water to fill the urn.
The first job – to get connected