Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jane Ayres
Deathbed Fantasia
as now melts & nowhere goes nowhere
we wash up breathless
a box of blue light star-cushioned
harvesting morphine-thick razorlick-blueberry-pinch
& my sub-tropical heart
will punctuate the idea of treacling hope
puncturing the sense of a book
Opacity.
(it is not enough it is not enough)
find the version of yourself with sharpened corners
urge it forwards
& now the blue makes sense. kind of.
Jane Ayres was shortlisted for the 2021 Aesthetica Creative Writing Award. Her first collection edible was published by Beir Bua Press (July 2022) and micro-chapbook my lost womb still sings to me published by Porkbelly Press (October 2023)
Gabrielle Meadows
She gets into your bed
like when she was little.
Flowers grow out of the wardrobe,
moss claims the windowsill
Alice Huntley
I had a leaf in my hair when I arrived
the receptionist thought it was a hairclip
Gemma Blakeley
My Dad Complains That The Hedges Are Overgrown
and the word bemuses me, implying as it does
the concept of excess in what can only be good.
Nick Cooke
Molluscous receivers, would that you could
turn your talents inwards, and pick up
all that goes on in the cerebral swamp . . .
Luke Moran
There’s a
flash of colour
from the hedge.
Cáit O’Neill McCullagh
And when you step into the clearing
there will be dancing. The unsteady moon, shaken
to ribbon; shimmering through regalia of clouds.
Adam Cairns
A buzzard mews, turns in the wind,
a faraway engine grumbles.
Siân Bentham
She doesn’t know what she is doing.
She chops and boils, snacks and sneezes, sits.
Classical radio plays, imbuing
the scene with comic dignity and wit.
J.P. Lancaster
Ivy thrives
despite dependency.
It hangs on, has its other day.