Today’s choice
Previous poems
Eugene O’Hare
In Memory of Anne
It hasn’t been this bright all year –
the moon’s white scalp, spot-lit,
a head turned away from a thing
the rest of us fear: unearthly dark
and its stars – the small unfindable
glass in a vast unwalkable carpet.
Night is where more things hide
than dare to appear. Except behind
closed eyes, here new worlds realise;
less-ordered, sculpted from twisted
timelines, reared as if out of a sleeping sea;
waves to keep the sleeper from wakeful thought.
So when the priest said she died
at home in her sleep, I replied Too vague
demanding to know during which
dream she was caught. Was she mid-chase –
half-dressed in a colour she’d never wear?
Already talking to the dead?
Or something more of our world, perhaps –
like changing the bed, reversing the car,
washing the step some Summer afternoon,
peeling a label from a beetroot jar –
her cupboards were still full; spices, pins,
seeds for pots. All those flowers.
Eugene O’Hare recently won runner-up for the 52nd Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award and was shortlisted for the poetry prize at Belfast Book Festival. His poems appear, or forthcoming, in The Frogmore Papers, Stand, Poetry Ireland Review, Acumen and others.
John Greening
On Stage in a home-made model theatre, c.1967 Glued to your block, in paint and ink you wait for Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life to stop. Smell of hardboard and hot bakelite. The lino curtain’s ready to go up. At which, the straightened coat hanger is shoved and on you...
Anna Bowles
Nothing bad can happen on a plane.
Engine fires, earache, hijackers; but no new grief.
Kirsty Fox
Winged Kirsty Fox is a writer and artist specialising in ecopoetics. She writes lyric essays and poetry, and has had work published by Apricot Press, Arachne Press, and Streetcake Magazine. She has a Masters in Creative Writing and is currently studying...
Jason Ryberg
Sometimes I’d swear that
the ancient box fan I’ve hauled
around with me for
years is a receiver for
the conversations of ghosts
Peter Wallis
Dead in a chest,
are folded matinee jackets, bonnets, bootees and mitts.
Tissue sighs like the sea at Lowestoft,
always Third week in August
Amanda Bell
We clipped a window through the currant, sat on folding chairs with keep-cups,
wrapped in blankets as we yelled through the prescribed two-metre gap.
Then took to mending – darning socks and patching favourite denims
Anna Maughan
Illness had left me
brittle as frost, icicle-thin
swaddled in borrowed warmth
Angeliki Ampelogianni
on marble tiles bird like
I am a pin measuring drops in the toilet bowl
A W Earl
Doors
My parents’ house became a place of closed white doors,
where sound hung spare and echoes found no junk
or clutter to rest themselves upon.