Today’s choice
Previous poems
Wendy Clayton
Everything Changed except our Way of Thinking
I’m always thinking about how I can find more human beings. Or how I can have a better relationship with a human being. Why you are you. And I am I. And why that should be a problem. It wasn’t when we were young. Until you became more you. And I I. I am sorry. It is a sorrow. Always has been. Now we can’t even
let the bees out.
Wendy Clayton taught English and general subjects, was active and published in several poetry journals: A Pennine Platform, A Pennine Anthology, The North, Indigo Dreams, Shearsman, Osiris, Tears in the Fence, Stand, The International Times, The Fortnightly Review, Stride and forthcoming in Stride, Stand and in Pamenar. Her poetry was long-listed for the Erbacce poetry prize, 150 out of 15,000 – in summer 2022. In the same year she participated in the Carcanet summer course with Michael Schmidt and John McAuliffe. Twinship and Consciousness, was published in October, 2021, With others she worked to found an alternative school in Geneva.
Farah Ali
Notes from nature on how to survive this:
1. Learn crypsis and mimesis be a gecko or a mossy frog
2. Method actors sway like dead-leaf mantises on branches
James Benger
We tore it all down
just to watch it burn,
standing in that alley
of forgotten refuse.
Graham Clifford
Check the cavities in you where hurt goes,
exactly the right shape to house an insult
like a power tool snug and clipped in its case.
Gill Horitz
I woke to workers with blades
along the verge, yellow-jacketed
to signify contracted rights
Anita Karla Kelly, CE Collins, Clare Painter on International Women’s Day
In the beginning of the end she bit the thing she wasn’t meant to bite.
Apple stuck in her throat, one bite taken, then swallowed whole.
Elaine Baker
To my Ovaries
My cahoonas. My muscular daisies.
Potent white olives. You make me sick.
Jan FitzGerald
What is not to love
when you draw back curtains
and taste clouds
in their newness and innocence
Helen Finney
At my feet the window sprawls a view of kneaded land,
craggy baked by the hand of the gods, dusted green
with short bit grass.
Eugene O’Hare
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