Today’s choice
Previous poems
David Van-Cauter
House
…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 and the politicians are smirking trying to deny the evidence, saying no it didn’t happen that way, the video is wrong and I’m thinking of you in the crisis house trying to sleep because you said our home was trying to kill you, how it isn’t you, it’s where you are and how the place is a hellhole where the drains are blocked and everything is broken but I don’t see it and you feel sorry for me being blind to all the unresolvable unfixable problems and you keep saying it over and over and you can’t live here you cannot live here it’s all fucked it’s all fucked and I watch the man being killed again by ICE from a different angle after the pepper spray and the beating and he’s saying no, leave her alone and those are his last words as they shoot him ten times and I’m wondering if we’ll ever be the way we were or if this is it now, reality shot down in a hail of bullets as our world accepts that nothing is true any more, that this did not happen and it could not happen here, not here, where we know what is right and who the enemies are, but it’s not you, no, it’s the house, it’s just the house, and if we didn’t live here then everything would no longer be broken, we’d have no home but at least we’d have our lives back and there wouldn’t be all this confusion but you’re not here now and the man lies still again and then he is alive saying no no no and the bullets hit and the man lies and the man lies and the man lies still…
Susan Jane Sims
After you died,
someone asked:
What was it like
in those final sixteen days
waiting for your son to die?
Jane Frank
I imagine returning to the house.
Furniture is piled up in the rain—
the ideas that won’t fit.
Ilias Tsagas
I used to dial your number to hear your voice. I would hold the receiver for a long time as if your voice was trapped inside . . .
Jim Paterson
Shove it, that farewell
and the sky shimmering with frost
and the waves wrecking on the shore
Philip Rush
Tom’s advice, mind you,
was to drink hot chocolate
last thing at night
on a garden bench
beneath the moon.
Rosie Jackson
Today, I talked with a friend about death
and what it means to have arrived in my life
before I have to leave it . . .
Mariam Saidan
they said sing in private,
Zan shouldn’t sing.
Brian Kirk
The train is the way,
the tracks a scar cut
deep in the land
you can’t help but touch.
Michelle Diaz
Mum was
a raised axe and a party hat.