Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jeff Skinner
Hamlet in the Scanner
Can’t hear yourself think only the bass line
of a heart thumping. Your head’s clamped.
You can’t move. A panic button slicks
a palm, a soft wet plum. You could be
bounded in a nutshell and count yourself a king
of infinite space if not for this death metal
soundtrack banging in your ears.
Is the rest silence? Wriggling fingers,
toes, fingers, you fidget and flex, as you will –
for anything to do. Otherwise you’re
paralysed with angst. If Ophelia should come
she would not see you as you see yourself –
someone whose life is being examined
whose breath’s short, who swallows his spit.
Did your gaolers slip off for a smoke –
leave you in your ship going nowhere?
Outside, a summer’s day you can’t get to:
more undreamt things, other voices.
Jeff Skinner‘s poems are widely published, most recently in Atrium, Underbelly Press, Black Nore Review, The Aftershock Review. His pamphlet, Us, was shortlisted for the Live Canon pamphlet prize. In July 2023 he was diagnosed with a neuro-degenerative condition.
David Redfield
If we think we are right
the sun may never set;
Helen Evans
Things I did then that I hadn’t done before
Asked the neighbours if they wanted anything in my online weekly shop and
Bought yeast, flour, long-life milk and 70-per-cent-alcohol hand sanitiser and
Cut my own hair, even the bits round the back I couldn’t see, and
Kirsty Crawford
Elizabeth is hiding in the cupboard under the sink
Small enough to fold between cream cleaner and floor polish
Too big to keep elbows away from wire wool
Katie Beswick
You wouldn’t believe how quick they grew —
Our babies were men now. Lifting bags of concrete
they rebuilt cities, slab by slab, reinforcing cracks.
Sally St Clair
I’d asked for this not to be recorded;
this failure on my part, to be a good
parent;
Olivier Faivre
monkey mathematics
A monkey grabs one nut here, one nut
there, and two more over there.
He counts them with care.
HLR
I find six errors in the proofreading manual & the irony doesn’t tickle me.
I am enraged by typos, poor formatting, missing commas. This is my Big Girl Job,
the one I always wanted —
Angela Howarth Martinot
What seems to be the problem ? He asks
in that slightly condescending tone.
Seems, I think, Seems.
It seems, I say,
that I have a problem with my inner fish,
Bianca Pina
My Dad once dismissed a friend as a hypocrite,
which I took to be an induction to the truth.
Lately though, I think the things I love in you
I love because they’re grossly inconsistent.