Today’s choice
Previous poems
Anthony Lawrence
Gathering Mushrooms in the Shadow of a Barn
One had a ball of water that magnified the word shiver
on its cap, and one had been torn and thrown
against the wood, a soft bomb, leaving gills and skin.
I knew enough to give them names and say the words
primordium and veil in the manner of my neighbour
who can find mushrooms blindfolded. The smell,
she says, when you’re downwind, is earth as invitation,
earth made vertical with lit stems. My fingers flecked
with spores, the knees of my jeans dark from over-
night rain, I arranged them cap-to-stipe in lines.
In the barn, at a table, my knife gleamed in a band
of afternoon sun. Agaricus campestris, I said,
and a crow leaned from a rafter to listen.
Anthony Lawrence has published nineteen collections of poetry and a novel. His books and individual poems have won a number of awards, including the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Ginkgo Prize for Eco poetry, the Gregory O’Donohue Poetry prize and the Peter Porter Poetry Prize. He lives on Moreton Bay, Queensland.
Martin Mooney
The footbridge was skinned in graffiti – slogans, threats,
declarations of love, swastikas. Grek. Kost. Lapse.
Aardhra Chandran
Canvas boots, pig-iron tacks.
At midnight, the wooden platform groans like a hull.
Jason Lovell
While children kneel at your cage in awe
edge offerings of cashew nuts, chopped fruit,
curse words into your magnificent beak,
mums settle carrier bags at tired wet feet
Elijah MacBean
My Name is My Name Ami never let anyone call my sister Sam – it always had to be Samina. She said she’d rather be waterboarded than let her daughter be whitewashed by whites too conservative to spare the extra syllables. Ami never let anyone call...
Damen O’Brien
The coastline’s smile is sharp with blackened teeth,
seabird shelters, scarps, cutaways, broken reefs:
the bloody mouth of a boxer who can’t be dropped,
punch drunk with the brain’s purple pounding . . .
Gwil James Thomas
Terrestrial locomotion
across concrete,
the inverted pendulum,
moving flesh and boot –
Royal Rhodes
The passenger train along the Connecticut shoreline moves as if in a
river of wooden ties and steel rails. . .
Neil Elder
There are blackbirds singing beautifully at dawn,
Mozart and Shakespeare existed and that’s fine . . .
Abegail Morley
Tonight, my houseplant child asks about sunlight,
brushes my arm as she stutters on the word,
photosynthesis . . .