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.
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.
Ian Badcoe
We are eating dessert when the urge overcomes her
to scrawl mathematics, the night ticks on
Sim Pereira-Madder
Tom Giles once asked me if I had tools and at that
time I didn’t because I was fifteen maybe sixteen
Molly Knox
I count:
four cows in the meadows. Made
friends with them this Spring.
Pascal Vine and – – – ajae – – – for our Invisible and Visible Disabilities Feature
Chronic fuck slug
Chronic floor sleeping
Chronic fist seething
Chronic food swallowing
Chronic feuding skin
Chronic foreseen surrender
Chronic failure synonym
Chronic sel(f)-inlictednes(s)
Chronic found inner-piece(s)
Chronic forcibly sending love (&) (kisse(s))
Chronic we (f)ucking mi(s)s you
– Pascal Vine
breaking through the battering lashings of exhaustion and overwhelm,
a quiet, passionate voice buds within you.
it exasperatingly sprouts and presses and pouts, saying:
“we’re forever dogged!
it’s forever dusk!
our soul’s been over-tillaged!
you’re becoming but a husk!
we need a rest
we need a break please!
our brittle bones are steeped in ache.”
– – – ajae – – –
Ellie Spirrett and Erin Coppin for our invisible and visible disabilities feature
This is the first time you have been out in three weeks.
Today sits like a joker between diamonds. Your punctured
skin sags over your bones, and you have dragged it
dangerously down the tarmac to mine this charity
shop for new parts.
– Ellie Spirrett
the riding of bikes
the rhythm of legs
the wind-driven tears
the wobbling turns
the handlebarred bags
the motion, the motion
-Erin Coppin
Will Snelling
The garden shudders, brushed with ice,
its edges slightly blurred away
by cloud unfolding over the grass.
Jonathan Croose
The gravel drive seems longer now,
the knock feels like a split of skin
and out on the fen road, by now there are chalk marks,
diagrams and calculations, cones and contraflows,
plastic zips and silent spinning lights.
No more need for sirens there,
but here, here on the doorstep, every alarm must ring.
Gordon Scapens
Hid some between hearing
and interpretation,
made a new alphabet.
Hid some between wit
and pedantic speeches
to fool anyone listening.