Today’s choice
Previous poems
Michael Mintrom
A Map of Old Battles
They lie deep in a forest, wounds
unseen, unhealed. Further back,
an escarpment with dark scars.
Visiting, perhaps you expected
something tactile, something to hold,
markers of exact terrain, key sites
on paper or cowhide. Who can say
how history unfolds? Waiting for sleep,
visions return — bodies, faces.
Indelible feelings. This topography
I carry. Thank you because you listen,
you understand this haunting.
Should we talk of fit and proper things,
above our power to add or subtract?
This is my map. It is not the only map.
Michael Mintrom lives in Melbourne, Australia. His poems have appeared in various literary journals including: Amsterdam Quarterly, The Blue Mountain Review, Cordite Poetry Review, The Ekphrastic Review, London Grip, The Metaworker, and Shot Glass Journal.
Nicolas Spicer
Paysage Moralisé
There’s more to this three-foot square:
lilac vetch & vermilion
field-poppies, some sort of crucifer . . .
Luke Bateman
Brown limpets with tonsured heads
creeping over the fish-stink isle,
spongy underfoot, seaweed for grass.
Adam Horovitz
Such stillness in the air. The attic window
is a cupped ear set to alert the house to subtle
shifts in atmosphere: auguries; signs; any tiny
notice of cataclysmic change. . .
Jenny Mitchell
What Part of Me? Sun demands a front row seat above the graveyard through the trees when my mother’s placed in soil, surrounded by her friends’ small talk – She must have sent the rays for us. Women in their Sunday best, men in greying suits...
L Kiew
Land has dried its eyes, grown hard
hands and interrogates each arrival:
Where are you from, really from?
David Redfield
If we think we are right
the sun may never set;
Helen Evans
Things I did then that I hadn’t done before
Asked the neighbours if they wanted anything in my online weekly shop and
Bought yeast, flour, long-life milk and 70-per-cent-alcohol hand sanitiser and
Cut my own hair, even the bits round the back I couldn’t see, and
Kirsty Crawford
Elizabeth is hiding in the cupboard under the sink
Small enough to fold between cream cleaner and floor polish
Too big to keep elbows away from wire wool
Katie Beswick
You wouldn’t believe how quick they grew —
Our babies were men now. Lifting bags of concrete
they rebuilt cities, slab by slab, reinforcing cracks.