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.
George Turner
Some days, the privilege of living isn’t enough.
The weight of the kettle is unbearable. You leave the teabag
forlorn in the mug, unpoured.
Craig Dobson
Slowly, ordinarily, the unimaginable happens,
lowering the past into the dark,
covering it.
Clive Donovan
If I were a ghost
I think I would shrink
and perch on wooden poles
and deco shades – get a good view
of what I am supposed to be haunting
Rose Ramsden
We left the play early. It was the last day before the start of secondary school. Dad told me off for slapping the seats
Seán Street
There was a time when I took my radio
into the night wood and tuned its pyracantha
needle along the dial through noise jungles
to silent darkness at the waveband’s end.
J.S. Dorothy
Find yourself by the lake,
its icy membrane split by the long
arrow of a skein, reflected
flurry of wings, cries
bawling.
Sarah Rowland Jones
The terns lift as one
from the salt-pools behind the beach
– a thick undulating line
Jean O’Brien
Winter soil is hard and hoar crusted,
birds peck with blunted beaks,
pushing up are the blind green pods
of what will soon be yellow daffodils,
given light and air.
Jean Atkin
We scoured the parish tip most weeks, when we were kids.
We clambered it in wellies. Ferals, we scavenged
in the debris of the adults’ lives.