The Poem of the Month for April 2025, selected by 2025 Anthology editors Val Braendler and Ben Adams, is The Art of Saving by Roz Schulz. The commended poems are limbo by Barbara Preston, Abandon Yourself to Mozart by Susan O’Brien and In the Vicinity of a Love Poem by Steve Evans.
The Art of Saving
Roz Schulz
They were the last on the butcher’s run, mid north,
dry hot summer, horse and cart, no refrigeration.
The bonus some leftover cuts, jokes with the butcher
and a flagon of wine into the sunset.
His wife cooked the week’s meat straight away –
His mind and soul were fashioned the way he beat
mugs out of tins, scrolled over the sharp top edge,
but you could still cut your lip on it. Waste was a fear
stamped into the grey stubble lines of his face,
running in the tough folds of his skin, an ache
that whittled away his spirit like the rapier- thin knife
that honed his pencils down to the stubs.
Saving became an art form. Decades later,
on his visits to our home in the suburbs,
we would hear the soft tap tapping from our shed
at the bottom of the yard, see his wiry figure
bent over the bench as he toyed with wood and nails
to make – what we never saw.
He’d retrieve the apple cores our children tossed away,
line them up on the window sill and point wordlessly,
as they ran off, baffled, to their heedless play.
What twisted logic caused him to wear on Sundays,
the same wornout shabby suit, while his wedding suit
of sixty years hung in the robe still new?
He’d be laid out in that one, soon, skin smoothed and waxen,
almost unrecognisable, in the taffeta lined coffin.
limbo
Barbara Preston
It couldn’t have been worse timing.
Four years ago, during her baptismal service,
the partly-wet child slipped from the young priest’s hold
and fell to the stone floor.
Her Father lunged forward, the mother cried out,
guests and family gasped – all hoping for the best,
but to no avail – the child was killed on impact.
Unfortunately, the priest had not quite completed
the sacrament to admit her as a member of the holy church.
As a result, the girl’s soul now resides in a place called Limbo,
situated somewhere between heaven and hell,
with access to neither –
a form of celestial no-man’s land.
She can be seen there, night and day,
in that place of neither one thing or the other,
riding a battered red trike around the drear shores
of Hades.
If asked, she will say she likes the noise the wheels make in the sand,
Though she finds pushing the pedals hard work
and is frightened by the glittery things she sees in the water.
Not old enough to remember clearly the affections of a mother,
the eternal deprivation of God’s love may not affect her as much as it would an older child.
Abandon Yourself to Mozart
Susan O’Brien
Abandon yourself to Mozart.
Ignore the effortful sawing
of the violins.
Trust the artistic ferment
that will bring you
to a place
of resolution.
The music concludes.
The members of the orchestra
are strangely becalmed –
sailors
who having wielded
their oars
are at last
in a safe harbour.
In the Vicinity of a Love Poem
Steve Evans
If you write a love poem, she said,
never mention love.
So, when she pauses at the mirror
with that blue as irises’ blue in her eyes,
or her fingers unexpectedly brush my skin,
or she leaves the porch light on for me when I’m late,
or her hand seeks mine in a lift,
or she makes that little seismic twitch in her sleep—
anything from the whole album,
the whole fistful of metaphors
amounting to one simple-as-the-simplest thing
stitched loosely to the next
without a hint of the taboo,
I still don’t write that word
and have no need
since every love poem has her in it.
[Originally published in Verge]