Today’s choice
Previous poems
L.B. Jørgensen
Flintinge
When my dad was a boy,
his parents brought him into the fields.
As the whole town picked sugar beets,
their breath hugged
furrows in pre-dawn darkness.
I think of the tug he was taught,
the sound of roots wrested
from the earth
cold in a child’s palms, smeared with dirt.
I’ve felt the swing he learned
to place one gently in the bed
of the tractor.
I imagine the scent of loam,
the sap of sugar sweet on his skin.
L.B. Jørgensen lives in Denmark but writes creatively in English. She has poems published in various magazines such as Magma, The North and Under the Radar. Her pamphlet A Woman Travelling is published by Paekakariki Press.
Janet Hatherley
In my cookery exam, we have to prepare a family meal This is summer and Mum can’t put out her trot line with its hooks because of swimmers so I buy three mackerel from the fishmonger. I cycle to the school bus stop one arm on the handlebar,...
Jane Ayres
& my sub-tropical heart
will punctuate the idea of treacling hope
puncturing the sense of a book
Annette Iles
across the street
I am washed off my feet
my heart
splashes up into pieces
Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig
Dusk is dancing & all the visual technologies at hand feel
overwhelmed: mobile eye, pit pastels, graphic card.
It’s down to language, then, imagine.
Antony Owen
Twenty- something sex are bodies.
thrown down like sophomore prose.
Martin Mooney
The footbridge was skinned in graffiti – slogans, threats,
declarations of love, swastikas. Grek. Kost. Lapse.
Aardhra Chandran
Canvas boots, pig-iron tacks.
At midnight, the wooden platform groans like a hull.
Jason Lovell
While children kneel at your cage in awe
edge offerings of cashew nuts, chopped fruit,
curse words into your magnificent beak,
mums settle carrier bags at tired wet feet
Elijah MacBean
My Name is My Name Ami never let anyone call my sister Sam – it always had to be Samina. She said she’d rather be waterboarded than let her daughter be whitewashed by whites too conservative to spare the extra syllables. Ami never let anyone call...