Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jeff Skinner
Hamlet in the Scanner
Can’t hear yourself think only the bass line
of a heart thumping. Your head’s clamped.
You can’t move. A panic button slicks
a palm, a soft wet plum. You could be
bounded in a nutshell and count yourself a king
of infinite space if not for this death metal
soundtrack banging in your ears.
Is the rest silence? Wriggling fingers,
toes, fingers, you fidget and flex, as you will –
for anything to do. Otherwise you’re
paralysed with angst. If Ophelia should come
she would not see you as you see yourself –
someone whose life is being examined
whose breath’s short, who swallows his spit.
Did your gaolers slip off for a smoke –
leave you in your ship going nowhere?
Outside, a summer’s day you can’t get to:
more undreamt things, other voices.
Jeff Skinner‘s poems are widely published, most recently in Atrium, Underbelly Press, Black Nore Review, The Aftershock Review. His pamphlet, Us, was shortlisted for the Live Canon pamphlet prize. In July 2023 he was diagnosed with a neuro-degenerative condition.
Emma Simon
No-one has seen a ghost while breast-feeding
despite the unearthly hours, the half-light
mad sing-song routines of rocking a child
back to sleep.
Kushal Poddar
The furniture covered in once
transparent now foggy sheets
craft the room a morgue, and we
identity the bodies
Erich von Hungen
And the yellow moths
like some strange throw-away
tissues used up by nature
circle the lamp hanging above.
Helen Frances
I wasn’t in, so she left me a note.
Each word a tangle of broken ends, some oddly linked
to the next with a ghost trail of ink
from her rose-gold marbled fountain pen,
a rare indulgence she’d bought herself.
Suzanne Scarfone
truth be told
part of me has lived
in this box of disquiet
for years and years
let’s see
Julia Webb
Because a woman woke up
and her head had become a flower.
Freyr Thorvaldsson
A candle eats away at air
At the same rate that we do
Konstandinos (Dino) Mahoney
A teacher guides his pupils past headless marble torsos,
dusty cabinets of tiny Attic coins, pockmarked stylobates,
to a large clay pithos . . .
Maggie Brookes-Butt
For you, with your toddler bendiness,
the squat is a natural, easy position
while I hurt-strain, thinking of miners
crouched outside their front doors