Tuesday poem: Rest and silence
June 26, 2023
The last woman looks up, languid, at the three moons hanging in the sky, and thinks of fruit, although she’s not seen an apple for ten years. How strange to be the last woman, she thinks, you’d think I’d be extraordinary, rather than simply the last. She scratches her scalp, realises that the bugs will outlast her, for at least for a week or so. She feels she should record thoughts, have a sudden itch for poetry, erupting like a wordy pimple. But there would be no-one to read it, should she drum out an elegy, despite that superfluity of moons, enough to drive a Wordsworth mad. She decides to nap the species into oblivion. The last woman yawns. PS Cottier
The book of poems made up of those originally published on this blog, called Tuesday’s Child is Full, has received a couple of positive reviews recently; here and here. That’s at Compulsive Reader and The Canberra Times. Both like the humour, which is refreshing.
Tuesday poem via link: Amorphous Solid
October 11, 2022
If you go to this site, you’ll find a new poem I wrote called Amorphous Solid, which is about a person turning into glass. It’s included in an on-line journal called Liquid Imagination, which has been around for quite a long time. Have a browse around. Unfortunately this is the last edition of the journal. The Poetry Editor is John C. Mannone, and the Managing Editor is Sue Babcock.
Scifaiku via link
July 1, 2022
Just had a number of science fiction haiku (scifaiku) published at Starlight SciFaiku Review Issue 2. Tap here to go there. The more I edit poetry for a newspaper, the more I seem to be writing speculative poetry. I am also having a scifaiku published every month at AntipodeanSF, which can be read here.
They say
July 2, 2021
that riding a unicorn is not unlike herding clouds that garden gnomes wake each night and eat snails that pistachio! is said by elves to each other after they sneeze that Pinocchio actually liked being a puppet more than a real boy that mirrors store each image and watch a kaleidoscope each night that marshmallow tastes exactly like drowning in freshly laid snow that the stomach inside the earth is always churning and burping that empty wine bottles stored in cellars refill every twelve years that walls are built by the fearfully dull [both giants and States] that mushrooms glow green when the moon goes superpink that hearsay could equally be called listentalk PS Cottier
Sometimes it’s good to write something just for fun. I think I’d like to meet the ‘they’ who say the things in this poem. The illustration is by Hugh Thomson, via the ever wonderful Old Book Illustrations.
Social distancing from ghosts
March 16, 2021
Just had a new poem published at Not Very Quiet, an online journal of women’s poetry. The theme was ‘mask’, which immediately made me think of how useless a mask would be against ghosts. I hope you enjoy the poem, and do look at the rest of the issue, which was edited by Moya Pacey and Sandra Renew.
PS Cottier 