Category Archives: short poems

Casual form: Lisa Marshall, ‘Lust’

Leave a reply

Under the moonlight’s magical hold
Lust prowls like a wolf, hungry and bold

Slinking by with a wink of the eye
Slowly drawing me in on the sly

Into temptation’s cunning allure
Tainting even the purest of pure

Whispered confessions into the wind
Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned

*****

Editor’s comments: I’m classifying these lines as ‘casual form’: the meter is undisciplined by classical standards, but the beat is clear and the rhymes are straightforward. The verse is as natural to English as nursery rhymes, noted for their ease of memorisation without being classically regular. Look at the varying numbers of syllable per foot in the four lines of ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’, for example. English speech is very forgiving regarding unstressed syllables, while still maintaining a rhythmic flow – as we know from rap. By that standard, adherence to beat and structured rhyme is adherence to form.

Lisa Marshall is a poet and author who resides in beautiful Dartmouth, Nova Scotia – also known as the City of Lakes.  She is the author of Black Olive: A Novel and Poetry for the Feminist’s Soul, both of which are available on Amazon Kindle. 
Read more at Not Another Nice Girl Blog.

Photo: from Lisa Marshall’s blog.

Using form: simple, classical: Sara Teasdale, ‘May Day’

Leave a reply

A delicate fabric of bird song
Floats in the air,
The smell of wet wild earth
Is everywhere.

Red small leaves of the maple
Are clenched like a hand,
Like girls at their first communion
The pear trees stand.

Oh I must pass nothing by
Without loving it much,
The raindrop try with my lips,
The grass with my touch;

For how can I be sure
I shall see again
The world on the first of May
Shining after the rain?

*****

Sometimes clean and simple is best for capturing the uncomplicated emotion of appreciating nature. Sara Teasdale in her element. As Louis Untermeyer commented on her verse: its “beauty is in the restraint” of its “ever-present though never elaborated theme.”

Photo: “Leonardslee Lakes and Gardens May 2022 18” by Timelapsed is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Semi-formal: Annie Fisher, ‘Today I’ll be a Slug’

Leave a reply

I’ll flow
slug-slow,
go naked
(naked’s fine).
My only mission
is to glisten.
Watch me shine.

*****

Annie Fisher writes: “I wrote the slug poem a year ago when I was on a writing retreat on the island of Iona in the Inner Hebrides. I was writing all sorts of other stuff on the retreat and that little poem popped into my head during a free-writing morning splurge. I guess the idea of slowing down, going with the flow, being true to oneself and letting one’s inner radiance shine is very much in keeping with the vibe of Iona, but it wasn’t a conscious thing.
I do love short poems. I’ve had others published on Snakeskin, including:

SONG THRUSH, MAY MORNING

Bird at my window, early, early,
Something to say, to say, to say,
This morning will not come again,
Make the most of today today.

That poem plays with the fact that the song thrush repeats its song. I sometimes sing it with some friends as a round using a tune we wrote. Here’s one other from the Snakeskin archive which I’m rather fond of:

GRANNY ON THE NAUGHTY STEP

Granny sits on the Naughty Step
Thinks about what she has done
Wishes she’d been a bit naughtier
It might have been fun…”

Annie Fisher’s background is in primary education, initially as a teacher and later as an English adviser. Now semi-retired she writes poetry for both adults and children and sometimes works as a storyteller in schools. She has had two pamphlets published with HappenStance Press: (2016) and (2020), and is due to have another pamphlet published in the next couple of months with Mariscat Press. It will be called ‘Missing the Man Next Door’. She is a member of Fire River Poets in Taunton, Somerset and a regular contributor to The Friday Poem https://thefridaypoem.com/annie-fisher/

Photo: “Banana Slug – A Series” by goingslo is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Short poem: RHL, ‘Pithy’

Leave a reply

His words are witty,
with a twist.
He says they’re “pithy”;
note the lisp.

*****

This is one of my three short poems published in the current Rat’s Ass Review – thanks, Roderick Bates – where the good and the rude, the mocking and shocking, all coexist harmoniously.

Photo: “Protest signs are an ineffectual means of communicating my nuanced views on a variety of issues that cannot be reduced to a simple pithy slogan!” by duncan is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Melissa Balmain, ‘The Marital Bed’

2 Replies

You always hog the blankets
and steal my magazines.
No need to ask what smells so rank–
it’s you, the king of beans.

Your toenails cut my shin.
You blow your nose: I jump.
I’m sanded by your bristly chin,
then bulldozed by your rump.

You scratch your back and sigh,
you grunt, harrumph and bray.
And yet the crazy truth is I
can’t sleep when you’re away.

*****

From Walking in on People © Melissa Balmain, 2014. Used by permission of Able Muse Press.

Melissa Balmain writes: “As with many of my poems, I owe my husband for being a good sport about seeing such things in print.  And I owe Light‘s founding editor, John Mella, who advised adding a foot to the third line of each stanza, for a 3-3-4-3 pattern. (That pattern has a name that I don’t recall. Could someone please remind me?)”

Melissa Balmain’s third poetry collection, Satan Talks to His Therapist, is available from Paul Dry Books (and from all the usual retail empires). Balmain is the editor-in-chief of Light, America’s longest-running journal of light verse, and has been a member of the University of Rochester’s English Department since 2010. She will teach a three-day workshop on comic poetry at the Poetry by the Sea conference in Madison, CT, in May 2024.

Photo: “#oneperson #AdultsOnly #onlywomen #onewomanonly #people #Adult !indoors #humanbodypart #Bed #realpeople #BlackBackground #closeup #day #awakenings” by nikdanna is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Isabel Chenot, ‘Echoes of Love’

1 Reply

The house is creaking like a rocking chair.
I’m small again,
comforted by the sway of matter in a shift of air,
cosseted by wind.

Undulate earth, how do you slip your hum
around our roar
of concrete, needles, neon, wadded gum,
demented hungers, war,

discarded children? Your lap is full of us
and of our wrong.
How can you simplify the noise
to cradle our first song?

*****

First published in Shot Glass Journal.

Isabel Chenot has loved and practiced poetry for as long as she can remember. Her poems have been published in Shotglass and other places, and some of them are collected in The Joseph Tree, available from Wiseblood books.

“Man, woman and child on verandah of weatherboard house” by State Library Victoria Collections is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Short poem: RHL, ‘God – pfft!’

1 Reply

All the things God could do,
all the things he doesn’t:
stop earthquakes and disease,
world war between first cousins…
Complaints at God may seem
rashly impertinent–
But so what? Life shows God
clearly omnimpotent.

*****

Not much to say about my rude little poems, except that a lot of them get published in Rat’s Ass Review, whose Spring/Summer issue has just (optimistically) been published – thanks, Roderick Bates! And also, well, I guess I was proud of the poem’s last word, though I’m definitely not the first person to think of it.

Cartoon: Matt Rosemier

Short poem: Richard Fleming, ‘The Clock Collector’

2 Replies

He didn’t hurry, took his time
to gradually collect the clocks:
large clocks, small clocks, clocks with a chime,
he gathered stocks of ticks’n tocks
time-pieces, chronographs, all gold,
he harvested them like a crop.
He hoped to put his life on hold
but time, unmeasured, did not stop.

*****

Richard Fleming writes: “I think I was just playing with rhyme on this one. That it says something serious was an unexpected bonus.”

Richard Fleming is an Irish-born poet (and humorist) currently living in Guernsey, a small island midway between Britain and France. His work has appeared in various magazines, most recently Snakeskin, Bewildering Stories, Lighten Up Online, the Taj Mahal Review and the Potcake Chapbook ‘Lost Love’, and has been broadcast on BBC radio. He has performed at several literary festivals and his latest collection of verse, Stone Witness, features the titular poem commissioned by the BBC for National Poetry Day. He writes in various genres and can be found at www.redhandwriter.blogspot.com or Facebook https://www.facebook.com/richard.fleming.92102564/

Using form: Experimental: Edmund Conti, ‘Solace’

Leave a reply

I know, I know it’s tough.
I know. It’s tough. I know.
It’s tough. I know it’s tough.
I know. I know. It’s tough.
I know it’s tough. I know.

It’s tough.

I know.

*****

Edmund Conti writes: “I guess I like because it uses just four words to say a lot.”

Edmund Conti has recent poems published in Light, Lighten-Up Online, The Lyric, The Asses of Parnassus, newversenews, Verse-Virtual and Open Arts Forum. His book of poems, Just So You Know, is published by Kelsay Books,
https://www.amazon.com/Just-You-Know-Edmund-Conti/dp/1947465899/
and was followed by That Shakespeherian Rag, also from Kelsay
https://kelsaybooks.com/products/that-shakespeherian-rag

Photo: ‘Solace’ by Edmund Conti

Short verse: Susan McLean, ‘Jeopardy’

Leave a reply

The first thing she requests post-surgery,
awake but drifting in the morphine glow,
is that my sister turn on the TV
so that the two can watch her favorite show.
Weak but alive, unsure if she has cancer,
my mother turns to questions she can answer.

*****

Susan McLean writes: “I wrote this poem while I was over a thousand miles away from the scene it describes, based on my sister’s phone account of what happened. The irony of the show’s title under the circumstances was the first stimulus for the poem, but also I almost laughed when I thought of how characteristic my mother’s action was. Given that she was in her eighties when she had major surgery, my mother’s jeopardy was very real, and I wrote the poem while we still didn’t know whether she had cancer. She did not. There is another irony, in that the game show Jeopardy! provides answers for which the contestants have to supply the appropriate questions. Yet, in context, those questions are answers.
The hardest challenge when writing about an emotional situation is to focus on the facts and let the emotions emerge by suggestion. A hint of humor acts as a counterweight to unspoken anxieties. The poem was first published in Measure and later appeared in my second poetry book, The Whetstone Misses the Knife.”

Susan McLean has two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

Susan McLean has two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
https://www.pw.org/content/susan_mclean

Photo: “Filming Jeopardy!” by jurvetson is licensed under CC BY 2.0.