Today’s choice
Previous poems
Linda McKenna
Smashing Narcissus
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 badly
pitched shelters, the same lack of meat,
converged. Laboured in the stifling heat
at the command of our officers, the same
fools and bullies. Smashed and smashed
at the indecently gleaming white marble,
until the lawn sparkled with a covering
of unseasonable frost. Later, picking splinters
from the same worn-out blankets, knew
if we looked into the shimmering lake
we would see the true picture of ourselves.
Linda McKenna’s second collection, Four Thousand Keys, was published by Doire Press in 2024. The title poem from her debut collection, In the Museum of Misremembered Things, (Doire Pres 2020), won the 2020 An Post Irish Book Awards Poem of the Year. She has had poems published in a wide range of publications and in 2018 won the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing.
Brian Kirk
That was the time you caught
the mumps and I was half
afraid I’d catch it too.
Dawn Sands
Walking home from the lecture on Frankenstein
through the November mizzle, small breaths of exhaust
sighing in the twilight headlights, particles of wet air commingling.
Ken Evans
Octopus I am one Like short of being beautiful. Five hundred more Followers, I’m away to fight culture wars. I Block two for lies Quora does not verify. Counter-factuals are ok, there’s simmering wastelands to make out of vague, but someone sent a shroom...
Mary Mulholland
It doesn’t trust paper. It writes itself
in my head where no one can reach it,
laugh, tear it to shreds, or
call it a waste of space, a disgrace.
Afolabi Ezra
It was a quiet day—
no bad news,
no sudden loss,
no reason to hold my breath.
Karina Jutzi
I think today of the boy in choir class
who closed his eyes when we sang
about Jesus. Who swayed, as if the Lord
Isabelle Thompson
We saw a kingfisher threading the bright needle
of his body along the river. We saw a shag, stamping
her prehistoric shadow on the sky. We saw a hobby,
Roger Robinson
We walk from cane fields,
cotton in our nightshirts, sweet
Amirah Al Wassif
My double sits before me now. I stare deep into her, as I do every day after midnight. When I raise my hands, she raises hers.