Today’s choice

Previous poems

Kathleen Gray

 

 

 

Liberty

When she asked what I wanted
to be when I grew up, my mother
laughed when I said ‘free’

She’s been dead for more than
thirty years – not much freedom
in her kitchen-sink life

She settled for snatching time out,
pausing with that dreamy look,
that secret smile,

knife in one hand, half-scraped
carrot for Thursday’s soup
in the other, oblivious

to me spying from the kitchen
door, wondering where she
escaped to and if one day

she’d decide to take off
her apron, leave us free to
cook our own soup.

 

 

Kathleen Gray is Scottish by birth, French by adoption. Her poems have been published in various literary magazines, including New Feathers, Drawn to the Light, The Alchemy Spoon, London Grip, Poetry Scotland and Causeway. She lives in Paris

Rosie Jackson

I Am Trying to Love Frank O’Hara More
I really am! I am trying not to see his exclamation marks as cheap melodrama and his endless conjunctions as some kind of separation anxiety or fear of mortality for what do full stops signify except dying

Tom Blake

We were the housing and the housed,
meaning nothing except that
we were always occupied,
or to put it simply never out.