Today’s choice
Previous poems
Martin Mooney
Lapse
Graffiti artists, known as writers, are often misunderstood by society.
Eden Magazine
The footbridge was skinned in graffiti – slogans, threats,
declarations of love, swastikas. Grek. Kost. Lapse.
I’d assumed lapse was a tag, a nom de plume or guerre, but
as the morning drags itself towards noon the word
has surfaced and resurfaced: lapse, lapse, lapse. Noun
or verb? Am I instructed? Warned? By lunchtime
I wonder if it’s even word at all, perhaps the writer
just sprayed shapes that look like L A P S E by fluke.
And by mid-afternoon it’s drained of sense, a dazed
semantic husk, so that as I cross the bridge again
I whisper it to myself as virgin sound, unsaid till now:
brute air lip-shaped, a world in a kind of freefall.
Martin Mooney is the author of four collections – Grub (1993), Rasputin and his Children (2000), Blue Lamp Disco (2003) and The Resurrection of the Body at Killysuggen (2011). A New and Selected is due from Greenwich Exchange later in 2026
Stephen Keeler
Among the joys of love was when we got
our first apartment on a boulevard
above the trams and tree-tops and the wires
that cut the street like tangram puzzles and
Khairina Anindya, Genevieve Beech
‘Khair’
At the feet
of al-Ka‘ba
you asked for a daughter.
‘BIRTHLIGHT’
You are ordinary
to the teenager on the bus,
the doctor at our six-week check.
Linda McKenna
We set about him with rifle butts and spades,
waiting our turn alongside our enemies,
the same sunburnt flesh, the same blistered
feet. Met where our camps, the same
Abigail Ottley
She remembers the house of her husband He’s not, as they said he is: loathsome, most monstrous. He has a strange and sinister beauty. His eyes are obsidian, shot through with gold, a ruby burning in each. A noble brow, and magnificent cheekbones. You can...
Frank Phelan
I am most visceral
when being disarmed
by a song, a lyric
written and sung…
in the broad New Yawk vowels
Katherine Duffy
The ferry pushes the sea,
forces a long, white reply
that speaks of where we’ve been
Audrey Cotterell
In a corner chapel of the abbey
I lit a small candle, and sent the flame
as a message only half composed
Dylan Foster
there’s not much you can do
when the planets
are telling you to stop
Jeff Skinner
Can’t hear yourself think only the bass line
of a heart thumping. Your head’s clamped.