Today’s choice
Previous poems
Laura Sheahen
Outsider
What is the ancient curse they know that you don’t
Moving along their mouth-lines and their eyebrows
Lowering their lids, tensing their nods or shrugs
No spell has locked their lips but they are silent
Watching you try, watching you fall again
(Jeweled box with hind-heart bloody in its depths
Mirror that will not show a child its face
Quiet are mice and insects in the castle)
The shoulders shrug the eyes refuse beseeching
And every throat grows closed Hushed with the secret
Watching you stagger
Watching you try again
Laura Sheahen is an American poet who spends part of her time in Tunisia. Her poems have been published in PN Review, The Manhattan Review, The Lincoln Review, and other journals. She writes criticism for The New Criterion, ArtsFuse, The Irish Times, and other publications. lsheahen.substack.com
Gail Webb
He cuts. I lie still, teach myself
to dream of St David’s Bay,
seaweed strewn on incoming tides,
surfers slice big waves in half.
Kim Cullen
I pull a dress over my head
calm foggy blue linen
sleeved in lavender,
press frizzed hair
Mark G. Pennington
Vigo in Autumn is still a furnace
the nightjars
roost on ram-tarmacked roads
and hot guapas carrying fish baskets
Ivan McGuinness
Begins
in a bubble
strained by chalk.
Where the brim-full hill cries,
weeping tracks merge
Elizabeth Wilson Davies
There are places in Wales I don’t go: reservoirs that are the subconscious of a people – R S Thomas
Cofiwch Dryweryn, that two-word protest,
white on blood-red background, landscaped in green,
Kay Feneley
Some days I must immerse myself in the waters
These days are more than others
Monday 09.06 – a sewage overflow has activated
David I. Hughes
He does not shout. He charts.
Where treaty lines once hung like old nets,
he inks the deep, the dark, the yet-unmade.
Anne Stewart
Huddled on the cat’s blanket,
hyenas crying through the night.
Scribbled notes regretting tea,
Mark Czanik
I loved the tales Luke told me of starving writers,
and the sacrifices they made following their hearts.