Today’s choice
Previous poems
Mike Duggan
The Stirrups Of Genghis Khan
A decapitated road sign
Spears the yellow verge,
Meaningless as a symbol
Of progress. A vain strut.
The bus driver’s hands are folded
As the stop approaches.
From the fields,
An algorithm of hooves enters the ears
Of yawning school children.
More is known than ever before.
The day doubles over, winded
And as language must
Death moves
A little off, as if uncertain.
Mike Duggan is a fifty year old poet from London. His work has appeared over time in The Rialto, Magma, Tears In The Fence and Perverse. He has a new poem forthcoming in The Rialto 104 and his pamphlet Masquerade was recently shortlisted by the Dithering Chaps press.
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
Sally Michaelson
Heads under bonnets
mechanics catch a wiff
of a girl passing
Carmen Marcus
extract from The Keen Is ar scath a Chéile a mhaireann na daoine: It is in the shadow of each other we live. Watching with the dying. Travelling with the dead. Phyllida Anam-Áire; The Celtic Book of Dying, Findhorn Press, Vermont, 2022 Àite...
Nina Parmenter
When The Threat of Hell Failed
God created the lanyard,
Bel Wallace
Month by month I felt my muscles harden
these hefty horns grew from my long skull
Stephen Keeler
Something about arriving somewhere new
just as afternoon is leaving . . .
Geraldine Stoneham
The silence and peace of this place
creeps through on birdsong.
Emma Lee
The instruction invites overthinking:
describe your hometown through
the medium of simple sentences