Today’s choice
Previous poems
Marc Janssen
Salem January IV
The sky opens
Blinking its single slackened eye.
It grumbly gets up.
Before shuttering again and whatever blue was there
Is gone.
It’s gone again.
What is there left to say about Marc Janssen? Maybe, his verse is scattered around the world in places like Pinyon, Orbis, Pure Slush, Cirque Journal, and Poetry Salzburg also in his book November Reconsidered. Janssen coordinates the Salem Poetry Project and keeps getting nominated for Oregon Poet Laureate.
Rose Lennard
Lord, grant me… On hot days, the back door stands open to the garden, to sudden wing flurries, sparrow chit-chat. By evening there are bluebottles upstairs, stupidly circling, banging themselves against the place the light comes from. I have been...
Linda Ford
The Fair Leaves Town The hum of early traffic resonates where skeletal rides seek egress on lorries bound for the next town, and the road opens like a wound, becomes a thoroughfare again. We view the marketplace as we would a post-festive room,...
Eugene Stevenson
Mace in Her Pocket She is used to walking unafraid of the echo off her heeled steps, moving through the parking lot in a still-dark, early morning hour. Mace in her pocket, fur coat on her back, fist wrapped around her keys, she takes a breath...
Joshua St. Claire
green spruce cone
a globe of sap slips
below the horizon
Piers Cain
I had a dream I had a dream. I dreamt it’s time to go. It’s time to leave. It’s time to stop this game. My boss appeared, the one from years ago. Her face was pink and thick with orange paint. “Still here? They don’t pay you any more”, she said. ...
Marcia Hindson
How To Bury Someone Else’s Da Make sure to pick the proper season. July is saturated, so is November. Spring is the perpetual king of felt-tip leaks and drownings, too full already. Remember how the whiteness of Winter is able to cool heart muscle...
Helen Campbell
How to Write Software First feel. Shape the solution. No different from the flint knapper sitting with his rocks; seeing the skin scraper’s hidden form. Or the weaver woman stringing her loom. the finished kelim in her mind’s eye. Then you must...
Rosie Garland
Poem inspired by an imaginary painting by Leonora Carrington Her hair is an updraft of orange flame, expression blurred like an early photograph where the cat is a flurry of paws. She has the small feet of an infant, but calloused from a lifetime...
Dennis Tomlinson
A Life Where are the aunts of yesteryear? Where are the moles under Granny’s lawn? Where are the pickled frogs and locusts? Where are the lizards, where the kiss on the banks of the Moselle? Where is the Wall behind the Brandenburg Gate? Where is...